came to him in his moments of spiritual exercise.

The bedrabbled snows of March shrank away before the keen, quickening
sunbeams; the hills emerged, brown and sodden, like the chrysalis of the
new year; the streams woke in a tumult, and all day and night their voices
called from the hills back of the mill: the waste-weir was a foaming
torrent, and spread itself in muddy shallows across the meadow, beyond
the old garden where the robins and bluebirds were house-hunting. Friend
Barton's trouble stirred with the life-blood of the year, and pressed
upon him sorely; but as yet he gave it no words. He plodded about, among
his lean kine, tempering the winds of March to his untimely lambs, and
reconciling unnatural ewes to their maternal duties.

Friend Barton had never heard of the doctrine of the survival of the
fittest, though it was the spring of 1812, and England and America were
investigating the subject on the seas, while the nations of Europe were
practically illustrating it. The "hospital tent," as the boys called an old
corn-basket, covered with carpet, which stood beside the kitchen chimney,
was seldom without an occupant,--a brood of chilled chickens, a weakly
lamb, or a wee pig (with too much blue in its pinkness), that had been
left behind by its stouter brethren in the race for existence. The old
mill hummed away through the day, and often late into the evening if time
pressed, upon the grists which added a thin, intermittent stream of tribute
to the family income. Whenever work was "slack," Friend Barton was sawing
or chopping in the woodshed adjoining the kitchen; every moment he could
seize or make he was there, stooping over the rapidly growing pile.

"Seems to me, father, thee's in a great hurry with the wood this spring. I
don't know when we've had such a pile ahead."