That Fortune | Page 5

mighty militia-man, and beside
him that of Phineas Arms, and on the headstone of each the legend
familiar at that period of our national life, "Killed by the Indians."
Happy Phineas Arms, at the age of seventeen to exchange in a moment
the tedium of the cornfield for immortality.
There was a tradition that years after, when the Indians had disappeared
through a gradual process of intoxication and pauperism, a red man had
been seen skulking along the brow of this very hill and peering down
through the bushes where the boy was now perched on a tree, shaking
his fist at the hated civilization, and vengefully, some said pathetically,
looking down into this valley where his race had been so happy in the
natural pursuits of fishing, hunting, and war. On the opposite side of
the river was still to be traced an Indian trail, running to the western
mountains, which the boy intended some time to follow; for this
highway of warlike forays, of messengers of defiance, along which
white maidens had been led captive to Canada, appealed greatly to his
imagination.
The boy lived in these traditions quite as much as in those of the
Revolutionary War into which they invariably glided in his perspective
of history, the redskins and the redcoats being both enemies of his
ancestors. There was the grave of the envied Phineas Arms--that
ancient boy not much older than he--and there were hanging in the

kitchen the musket and powder-horn that his great-grandfather had
carried at Bunker Hill, and did he not know by heart the story of his
great-grandmother, who used to tell his father that she heard when she
was a slip of a girl in Plymouth the cannonading on that awful day
when Gage met his victorious defeat?
In fact, according to his history-book there had been little but wars in
this peaceful nation: the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the incessant
frontier wars with the Indians, the Kansas War, the Mormon War, the
War for the Union. The echoes of the latter had not yet died away.
What a career he might have had if he had not been born so late in the
world! Swinging in this tree-top, with a vivid consciousness of life, of
his own capacity for action, it seemed a pity that he could not follow
the drum and the flag into such contests as he read about so eagerly.
And yet this was only a corner of the boy's imagination. He had many
worlds and he lived in each by turn. There was the world of the Old
Testament, of David and Samson, and of those dim figures in the dawn
of history, called the Patriarchs. There was the world of Julius Caesar
and the Latin grammar, though this was scarcely as real to him as the
Old Testament, which was brought to his notice every Sunday as a
necessity of his life, while Caesar and AEneas and the fourth
declension were made to be a task, for some mysterious reason, a part
of his education. He had not been told that they were really a part of the
other world which occupied his mind so much of the time, the world of
the Arabian Nights and Robinson Crusoe, and Coleridge and Shelley
and Longfellow, and Washington Irving and Scott and Thackeray, and
Pope's Iliad and Plutarch's Lives. That this was a living world to the
boy was scarcely his fault, for it must be confessed that those were very
antiquated book- shelves in the old farmhouse to which he had access,
and the news had not been apprehended in this remote valley that the
classics of literature were all as good as dead and buried, and that the
human mind had not really created anything worth modern notice
before about the middle of the nineteenth century. It was not exactly an
ignorant valley, for the daily newspapers were there, and the monthly
magazine, and the fashion- plate of Paris, and the illuminating sunshine
of new science, and enough of the uneasy throb of modern life. Yet

somehow the books that were still books had not been sent to the garret,
to make room for the illustrated papers and the profound physiological
studies of sin and suffering that were produced by touching a scientific
button. No, the boy was conscious in a way of the mighty pulsation of
American life, and he had also a dim notion that his dreams in his
various worlds would come to a brilliant fulfillment when he was big
enough to go out and win a name and fame. But somehow the old
books, and the family life, and the sedate ways of the community he
knew, had given him a fundamental and not unarmed faith in the things
that