tears came into his eyes.

He had seen tears even in the summer boarders' eyes; once or twice
when on a quiet evening it chanced that the old man unlocked the
secret chambers of his soul. For Ephraim Prescott had been through the
War. He had marched with the Seventeenth Pennsylvania from Bull Run to
Cold Harbor, where he had been three times wounded; and his memory was
a storehouse of mighty deeds and thrilling images. Heroic figures
strode through it; there were marches and weary sieges, prison and
sickness and despair; there were moments of horror and of glory,
visions of blood and anguish, of flame and cannon smoke; there were
battle flags, torn by shot and shell, and names of precious memory,
which stirred the deep places of the soul. These men had given their
lives for Freedom; they had lain down to make a pathway before her--
they had filled up a bloody chasm so that she might pass upon her way.
And that was the heritage they handed to their children, to guard and
cherish. That was what it meant to be an American; that one must hold
himself in readiness to go forth as they had done, and dare and suffer
whatever the fates might send.

Such were the things out of which Samuel's life was made; besides
these he had only the farm, with its daily tasks, and the pageant of
Nature in the wilderness--of day and night, and of winter and summer
upon the mountains. The books were few. There was one ragged volume
which Samuel knew nearly by heart, which told the adventures of a
castaway upon a desert island, and how, step by step, he solved his
problem; Samuel learned from that to think of life as made by honest
labor, and to find a thrill of romance in the making of useful things.
And then there was the story of Christian, and of his pilgrimage; the
very book for a Seeker--with visions of glory not too definite,