Jaspar Hume had a memory of childhood; of a house beside a swift-flowing
river, where a gentle widowed mother braced her heart against misfortune
and denied herself and slaved that her son might be educated. He had said
to her that some day he would be a great man, and she would be paid back
a hundredfold. And he had worked hard at school, very hard. But one cold
day of spring a message came to the school, and he sped homewards to the
house beside the dark river down which the ice was floating,--he would
remember that floating ice to his last day, and entered a quiet room
where a white-faced woman was breathing away her life. And he fell at her
side and kissed her hand and called to her; and she waked for a moment
only and smiled on him, and said: "Be good, my boy, and God will make you
great." Then she said she was cold, and some one felt her feet--a kind
old soul who shook her head sadly at him; and a voice, rising out of a
strange smiling languor, murmured: "I'll away, I'll away to the Promised
Land--to the Promised Land. . . . It is cold--so cold--God keep my boy!"
Then the voice ceased, and the kind old soul who had looked at him,
pityingly folded her arms about him, and drawing his brown head to her
breast, kissed him with flowing eyes and whispered: "Come away, laddie,
come away."

But he came back in the night and sat beside her, and remained there till
the sun grew bright, and then through another day and night, until they
bore her out of the little house by the river to the frozen hill-side.

Sitting here in this winter desolation Jaspar Hume once more beheld these
scenes of twenty years before and followed himself, a poor dispensing
clerk in a doctor's office, working for that dream of achievement in
which his mother believed; for which she hoped. And following further the
boy that was himself, he saw a friendless first-year man at college,