Hills of the Shatemuc | Page 7

one can get at it?"
"No, my boy," said the father, -- "no, Governor; no man thinks more
highly of it than I do. It has always been my desire that you and Will
should be better off in this respect than I have ever been; -- my great
desire; and I haven't given it up, neither."
A little silence of all parties.
"What are the things which 'really last,' Rufus?" said his mother.
Rufus made some slight and not very direct answer, but the question set
Winthrop to thinking.
He thought all the evening; or rather thought and fancy took a kind of
whirligig dance, where it was hard to tell which was which. Visions of
better opportunities than his father ever had; -- of reaching a nobler
scale of being than his own early life had promised him; -- of higher
walks than his young feet had trod: they made his heart big. There
came the indistinct possibility of raising up with him the little sister he
held in his arms, not to the life of toil which their mother had led, but to
some airy unknown region of cultivation and refinement and elegant
leisure; -- hugely unknown, and yet surely laid hold of by the mind's
want. But though fancy saw her for a moment in some strange travestie
of years and education and circumstances, that was only a flash of
fancy -- not dwelt upon. Other thoughts were more near and pressing,
though almost as vague. In vain he endeavoured to calculate expenses
that he did not know, wants that he could not estimate, difficulties that
loomed up with no certain outline, means that were far beyond ken. It
was but confusion; except his purpose, clear and steady as the sun,
though as yet it lighted not the way but only the distant goal; that was
always in sight. And under all these thoughts, little looked at yet fully
recognized, his mother's question; and a certain security that she had
that which would 'really last.' He knew it. And oddly enough, when he
took his candle from her hand that night, Winthrop, though himself no

believer unless with head belief, thanked God in his heart that his
mother was a Christian.
Gradually the boys disclosed their plan; or rather the elder of the boys;
for Winthrop being so much the younger, for the present was content to
be silent. But their caution was little needed. Rufus was hardly more
ready to go than his parents were to send him, -- if they could; and in
their case, as in his, the lack of power was made up by will. Rufus
should have an education. He should go to College. Not more
cheerfully on his part than on theirs the necessary privations were met,
the necessary penalty submitted to. The son should stand on better
ground than the father, though the father were himself the
stepping-stone that he might reach it.
It had nothing to do with Winthrop, all this. Nothing was said of him.
To send one son to College was already a great stretch of effort, and of
possibility; to send two was far beyond both. Nobody thought of it.
Except the one left out of their thoughts.
The summer passed in the diligent companionship of the oxen and Sam
Doolittle. But when the harvests were gathered, and the fall work was
pretty well done; the winter grain in the ground, and the November
winds rustling the dry leaves from the trees, -- the strongest branch was
parted from the family tree, in the hope that it might take root and
thrive better on its own stock elsewhere. It was cheerfully done, all
round. The father took bravely the added burden with the lessened
means; the mother gave her strength and her eyesight to make the
needed preparations; and to supply the means for them, all pinched
themselves; and Winthrop had laid upon him the threefold charge of his
own, his brother's, and his father's duty. For Mr. Landholm had been
chosen a member of the State Legislature; and he too would be away
from home all winter. What sort of a winter it would be, no one stopped
to think, but all were willing to bear.
The morning came of the day before the dreaded Saturday, and no one
cared to look at another. It was a relief, though a hated one, to see a
neighbour come in. Even that, Winthrop shunned; he was cleaning the
harness of the wagon, and he took it out into the broad stoop outside of

the kitchen door. His mother and brother and the children soon
scattered to other parts of the house.
"So neighbour," said Mr. Underhill, -- "I hear tell one of your sons is
goin' off, away