‘I might break my leg sometime,’ said David Brower, ’then they’ll come handy.’  But the Tribune was read carefully every week.

I have seen David Brower stop and look at me while I have been digging potatoes, with a sober grin such as came to him always after he had swapped ‘hosses’ and got the worst of it.  Then he would show me again, with a little impatience in his manner, how to hold the handle and straddle the row.  He would watch me for a moment, turn to Uncle Eb, laugh hopelessly and say:  ’Thet boy’ll hev to be a minister.  He can’t work.’

But for Elizabeth Brower it might have gone hard with me those days.  My mind was always on my books or my last talk with Jed Feary, and she shared my confidence and fed my hopes and shielded me as much as possible from the heavy work.  Hope had a better head for mathematics than I, and had always helped me with my sums, but I had a better memory and an aptitude in other things that kept me at the head of most of my classes.  Best of all at school I enjoyed the ‘compositions’ — I had many thoughts, such as they were, and some facility of expression, I doubt not, for a child.  Many chronicles of the countryside came off my pen — sketches of odd events and characters there in Faraway.  These were read to the assembled household.  Elizabeth Brower would sit looking gravely down at me, as I stood by her knees reading, in those days of my early boyhood.  Uncle Eb listened with his head turned curiously, as if his ear were cocked for coons.  Sometimes he and David Brower would slap their knees and laugh heartily, whereat my foster mother would give them a quick glance and shake her head.  For she was always fearful of the day when she should see in her children the birth of vanity, and sought to put it off as far as might be.  Sometimes she would cover her mouth to hide a smile, and, when I had finished, look warningly at the rest, and say it was good, for a little boy.  Her praise never went further, and indeed all those people hated flattery as they did the devil and frowned upon conceit She said that when the love of flattery got hold of one he would lie to gain it.

I can see this slender, blue-eyed woman as I write.  She is walking up and down beside her spinning-wheel.  I can hear the dreary buz-z-z-z of the spindle as she feeds it with the fleecy ropes.  That loud crescendo echoes in the still house of memory.  I can hear her singing as she steps forward and slows the wheel and swings the cradle with her foot: 

  ’On the other side of Jordan,
  In the sweet fields of Eden,
  Where the tree of Life is blooming,
  There is rest for you.

She lays her hand to the spokes again and the roar of the spindle drowns her voice.

All day, from the breakfast hour to supper time, I have heard the dismal sound of the spinning as she walked the floor, content to sing of rest but never taking it.