raised the woods around were dark and drear, and he knew not the good
soil from the bad; yet now he thought how, in this unseemly place, he
had stored his crop and toiled for years with unfailing health, where
his arm retained its nerve, unstrung neither by summer's heat nor
winter's cold, when the voice of his son, a tall stripling, who had
managed affairs during his illness, recalled him to the present, which
certainly to him I thought might wear no unfavourable aspect. He had
literally caused the wilderness to blossom as the rose, and saw rising
around him not a degenerate but an improving race, gifted far beyond
himself with bright mental endowments, the spontaneous growth of the
land they lived in, and which never flourish more fairly than when
engrafted on the old English stem; that is, the children of emigrants,
or the Anglo-bluenoses, have the chance of uniting the high-aspiring
impulses of young America to the more solid principles of the olden
world, thus forming a decided improvement in the native race of both
countries. But Stephen has too much of human nature in him not to
prefer the past, and I saw that the sunbeams of memory rested brightly
on the old log barn, obscuring the privations and years of bitter toil
and anxiety connected with it, and dimming his eyes to ought else,
however better; so that I left him to his meditations, and after a step
of sixty rods, the breadth of the lot, I am once more at home, where, as
it is now dark, we will close the door and shut out the world, to this
old country prejudice has made us attach a small wooden button inside,
the only fastening, except the latch, I believe, in the settlement.
Bolts and bars being all unused, the business of locksmith is quite at a
discount in the back woods, where all idea of a midnight robbery is
unknown; and yet, if rumour was true, there were persons not far from us
to whom the trade of stealing would not be new. One there was of whom it
was said, that for this reason alone was New Brunswick graced with his
presence. He had in his own country been taken in a daring act of