Samuel the Seeker | Page 2

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
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, leaving
danger of premature success.
And then, much later, some one left at the place a volume of the "Farm
Rhymes" of James Whitcomb Riley; and before Samuel's eyes there
opened a new vision of life. He had been happy; but now suddenly he
realized it. He had loved the blue sky above him, and the deep woods
and the sparkling lake; but now he had words to tell about them--and
the common tasks of his life were transfigured with the glory of song.
So one might milk the cow with stirrings of wonder, and mow in the
meadows to the rhythm of "Knee-deep in June."
From which you may divine that