mother's face, beautiful and delicate, even in the crude picture; and
Samuel did not know that the picture was crude, and wove his dreams
about it. Sometimes at twilight old Ephraim would talk about her, and
the tears would steal down his cheeks. The one year that he had known
her had sufficed to change the course of his life; and he had been a
man past middle life, too, a widower with two children. He had come
into the country as the foreman of a lumber camp back on the mountain.

Samuel had always thought of his father as an old man; Ephraim had
been hurt by a vicious horse, and had aged rapidly after that. He had
given up lumbering; it had not taken long to clear out that part of
the mountains. Now the hills were swept bare, and the population had
found a new way of living.

Samuel's childhood life had been grim and stern. The winter fell early
upon the mountain wilderness; the lake would freeze over, and the
roads block up with snow, and after that they would live upon what
they had raised in the summer, with what Dan and Adam--Samuel's half-
brothers--might bring in from the chase. But now all this was changed
and forgotten; for there was a hotel at the end of the lake, and money
was free in the country. It was no longer worth while to reap the hay
from the mountain meadows; it was better to move the family into the
attic, and "take boarders." Some of the neighbors even turned their
old corncribs into sleeping shacks, and advertised in the city papers,
and were soon blossoming forth in white paint and new buildings, and
were on the way to having "hotels" of their own.

Old Ephraim lacked the cunning for that kind of success. He was lame
and slow, tending toward stoutness, and having a film over one eye;
and Samuel knew that the boarders made fun of him, even while they