is, “overshot his mark.”  “Silas Stinson,” said my aunt, “will you allow that boy to sit there and tell such lies in your hearing?” His father saw that there was no help for it, he must at any rate make a show of authority; and looking at his hopeful son with a very solemn countenance, he addressed him in the language of Scripture, saying “O!  Ephraim what shall I do unto thee?” “It wouldn’t take me long to find out what to do, if he was mine,” said Aunt Lucinda.  “I’d take a good birch rod, and give him such a tanning, that he wouldn’t cut up another clothes-line in a hurry, I’ll promise you.”  “Upon the whole I think your counsel is wise, Cousin Lucinda,” replied his father, “for the wisest man of whom we have any account says, ’Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of correction shall drive it far from him,’ and the same wise man adds in another place:  ’He that spares the rod spoils the child.’” I know not whether he acted from a sense of duty, or to appease the anger of my aunt; but, for the first time in his life, I believe he did use the rod upon his son Ephraim.  He provided himself with a switch, the size of which satisfied even Aunt Lucinda, and, taking him to the back-kitchen, if we could judge by the screams which issued from thence, the whipping he bestowed upon Ephraim was no trifling affair.

CHAPTER XXIV.

Autumn again came, with its many-hued glories, and I must bid adieu to the uncle and aunt who had been so kind to me for the two past years.  Looking forward two years seem a long period; but, as memory recalled the evening of my first arrival at Uncle Nathan’s, I could hardly believe that two years had since then glided away.  I had bid my kind teacher and his family good-bye, and in the morning was to set out on my homeward journey.  I accompanied my uncle and aunt to grandma’s grave—­a handsome head-stone of white marble had been erected, and I enjoyed a melancholy pleasure in reading over and over again the sculptured letters, stating her name and age, with the date of her death.  Eighty-five years, thought I, as my eye rested upon the figures indicating her age, what a long, long life! and yet she often said that, in looking back over her long life, it only seemed like a short troubled dream; but it is all past now, and she rests in peace.  We sat long at the grave and talked of the loved one, now sleeping beneath that grassy mound; till the deepening twilight hastened our departure.  I could not check the tears which coursed freely down my cheeks when I turned away from the grave.  Seated around the fireside that evening we talked of the coming morrow when I was to leave them for an indefinite time, and they both spoke of how doubly lonely the house would seem when I should be gone.  It hardly seemed to me that the aunt I was leaving was the same I had found there, so softened and kind had she become.  “It’s not my way,” said she, “to