devoured his food and took advantage of him. This was the first
bitterness of Samuel's life; for he knew that within old Ephraim's
bosom was the heart of a king. Once the boy had heard him in the room
beneath his attic, talking with one of the boarders, a widow with a
little daughter of whom the old man was fond. "I've had a feeling,
ma'am," he was saying, "that somehow you might be in trouble. And I
wanted to say that if you can't spare this money, I would rather you
kept it; for I don't need it now, and you can send it to me when
things are better with you." That was Ephraim Prescott's way with his
boarders; and so he did not grow in riches as fast as he grew in soul.

Ephraim's wife had taught him to read the Bible. He read it every
night, and on Sundays also; and if what he was reading was sublime
poetry, and a part of the world's best literature, the old man did not
know it. He took it all as having actual relationship to such matters
as trading horses and feeding boarders. And he taught Samuel to take
it that way also; and as the boy grew up there took root within him a
great dismay and perplexity, that these moral truths which he read in
the Book seemed to count for so little in the world about him.

Besides the Bible and his mother, Ephraim taught his son one other
great thing; that was America. America was Samuel's country, the land
where his fathers had died. It was a land set apart from all others,
for the working out of a high and wonderful destiny. It was the land
of Liberty. For this whole armies of heroic men had poured out their
heart's blood; and their dream was embodied in institutions which were
almost as sacred as the Book itself. Samuel learned hymns which dealt
with these things, and he heard great speeches about them; every
Fourth of July that he could remember he had driven out to the
courthouse to hear one, and he was never in the least ashamed when the