laughing himself. 'You think my ambition as nonsensical as if I were to
freeze myself to death on the top of Mount Washington, only that people
might spy at me from the country round about. And, truly, that would be
a noble pedestal for a man's statue!'

'It is better to sit here by this fire,' answered the girl, blushing,
'and be comfortable and contented, though nobody thinks about us.'

'I suppose,' Said her father, after a fit of musing, 'there is
something natural in what the young man says; and if my mind had been
turned that way, I might have felt just the same. It is strange, wife,
how his talk has set my head running on things that are pretty certain
never to come to pass.'

'Perhaps they may,' observed the wife. 'Is the man thinking what he will
do when he is a widower?'

'No, no!' cried he, repelling the idea with reproachful kindness. 'When
I think of your death, Esther, I think of mine, too. But I was wishing
we had a good farm in Bartlett, or Bethlehem, or Littleton, or some
other township round the White Mountains; but not where they could
tumble on our heads. I should want to stand well with my neighbors and
be called Squire, and sent to General Court for a term or two; for a
plain, honest man may do as much good there as a lawyer. And when I
should be grown quite an old man, and you an old woman, so as not to be
long apart, I might die happy enough in my bed, and leave you all
crying around me. A slate gravestone would suit me as well as a marble
one--with just my name and age, and a verse of a hymn, and something to
let people know that I lived an honest man and died a Christian.'