take this attack on him. Alas! is such vanity at the bottom of even a
reasonable ambition? Perhaps his town would be proud of him if he were a
lawyer, a Representative in Congress, come back to deliver the annual
oration at the Agricultural Fair. He could see the audience of familiar
faces, and hear the applause at his witty satires and his praise of the
nobility of the farmer's life, and it would be sweet indeed to have the
country people grasp him by the hand and call him Phil, just as they used
to before he was famous. What he would say, he was not thinking of, but
the position he would occupy before the audience. There were no
misgivings in any of these dreams of youth.




II

The musings of this dreamer in a tree-top were interrupted by the
peremptory notes of a tin horn from the farmhouse below. The boy
recognized this not only as a signal of declining day and the withdrawal
of the sun behind the mountains, but as a personal and urgent
notification to him that a certain amount of disenchanting drudgery
called chores lay between him and supper and the lamp-illumined pages of
The Last of the Mohicans. It was difficult, even in his own estimation,
to continue to be a hero at the summons of a tin horn--a silver clarion
and castle walls would have been so different--and Phil slid swiftly down
from his perch, envying the squirrels who were under no such bondage of
duty.

Recalled to the world that now is, the lad hastily gathered a bouquet of
columbine and a bunch of the tender leaves and the red berries of the