ever to be had by man on any other terms: so teaching him, none too
soon, that any divine end is to be reached but through divine
means, that a great work requires a great preparation.

Of the lad's desperate experience henceforth in mere outward
matters the recital may be suppressed: the struggle of the earth's
poor has grown too common to make fresh reading. He toiled
direfully, economized direfully, to get to his college, but in this
showed only the heroism too ordinary among American boys to be
marvelled at more. One fact may be set down, as limning some true
figure of him on the landscape of those years in that peculiar
country.

The war had just closed. The farmers, recollecting the fortunes
made in hemp before, had hurried to the fields. All the more as the
long interruption of agriculture in the South had resulted in
scarcity of cotton; so that the earnest cry came to Kentucky for
hemp at once to take many of its places. But meantime the slaves
had been set free: where before ordered, they must now be hired. A
difficult agreement to effect at all times, because will and word
and bond were of no account. Most difficult when the breaking of
hemp was to be bargained for; since the laborer is kept all day in
the winter fields, away from the fireside, and must toil solitary
at his brake, cut off from the talk and laughter which lighten work
among that race. So that wages rose steadily, and the cost of hemp
with them.

The lad saw in this demand for the lowest work at the highest
prices his golden opportunity--and seized it. When the hemp-
breaking season opened that winter, he made his appearance on the