There are many hamlets in New Hampshire, five, ten miles or even more
from the railroad station. To the chance summer visitor the seclusion
and the rest seem entrancing. The glamour of mountain scenery and
trout effectually obliterates the brave signs of poverty and struggle
from before the irresponsive eyes of the man of city leisure. He
carelessly gives the urchin, mutely pleading in front of the unpainted
farm-house, a few cents for his corrugated cake of maple-sugar, and
asks the name of a distant peak. If he should notice, how would he
know the meaning of the scant crops of hay and potatoes, or of the
empty stall? Sealed to him is the pathos in the history of the owners
of the stone farm. His thoughts scarcely glance at the piteous wife
plaiting straw hats; the only son, whose rare happiness consists in
a barn dance in the village three miles below, and whose large eyes
contract with increasing age, and lose all expression except that of
anxiety.
There was a time perhaps when the backbone of the New World used to
be straightened by men of a mountain birth. The question whether the
hills of Vermont and New Hampshire produce giants of trade or law
to-day as they did fifty years ago, is an open one. So the grand
old stock is run out of the soil? And is it replaced by the sons and
grandsons of those sturdy farmers themselves, who buy back the rickety
homesteads, and remodel them into summer cottages?
Michael Angelo said that "men are worth more than money," and if what
was an axiom then is true in these fallen days of purse worship,
Mrs. Abraham Masters was the richest woman under the range of Mount
Kearsarge. For her son Isaac was the tallest, the strongest, the
tenderest, and truest boy in the county; but her farm of a hundred
acres, the only inheritance from a dead husband, was about the
poorest, most unprofitable, and most inaccessible collection of
boulders in the mountains.
It was situated upon the cold shoulder of a hill, sixteen miles from
the nearest station. The three-mile trail which led from the village
would have been easier to travel could it have boasted a corduroy
road. What a site for a hotel! Yet the hotel did not materialize, and
the "view" neither fed nor warmed nor clothed the patient proprietors
of the desolate spot.
"Never mind, I reckon we'll pull through," Isaac used to comfort his
mother.
"You're a good boy, Ikey. If the Lord is willin', I guess I am," she
answered with quaint devoutness.
But the Lord did not seem to be willing, and one spring He caused a
late frost in June to kill most of the seed, and a drouth in July and
August to wither what was left, and starvation stared in the faces of
the widow and her son. At this time, Isaac began to "keep company,"
and to talk of getting married in the next decade. He was twenty-two,
and had a faithful, saving disposition, when there was anything to
save. And whether he became engaged because there was nothing but love
to harvest, or whether, woman-like, Abbie Faxon loved him better than
she did her other suitors because of his poverty and misery, and was
willing to tell him so, I cannot pretend to decide. At any rate, Isaac
brought Abbie one afternoon from the village, three miles below, and
the two women kissed and wept, and Isaac went out and stood alone
facing the view; the apple in his throat rose and fell, and great
tears blinded his sight.
We can make no hero of Isaac, for he was none. His heart was as simple
and as clean as a pebble in a brook. Country vices had not smirched
him. He had a mind only for his mother, and the farm, and earning a
living--and a heart for Abbie. Great thoughts did not invade his head.
But this afternoon, as he stood there on the gray rock, his heart
bursting with his happiness, which was made perfect by his mother's
blessing, an apprehension for the future--bitter, breathless, began
to arouse him. The promise of the horizon suddenly became revealed to
him. The distant line of green, now bold, now sinuous, now uncertain,
had never asked him questions before, had never exasperated him with a
meaning.
But now he saw the tips of spires flecking the verdure of the far-off
valleys. He saw the hurrying smoke of a locomotive. He saw with
awakening vision, starting from that dead farm of his, the region of
trade and life. A film had fallen from his eyes. The energetic arrow
of love had touched his ambition, and his round, rosy face became
indented with lines of resolve. He turned and walked with a new tread
into the house.
"Mother! Abbie!" he blurted out, "I'm going away. I'm going to
Boston." He stopped and stammered as he saw the horror-stricken faces
before him.
"Lord a-mercy!"
"Ikey! Air you teched?"
"No," he resumed stoutly, "I be'ant. There's Dan Prentiss--he
went--see what he done; and Uncle Bill, he--"
"We hain't heard nothing from your Uncle Bill since he sot out. That
was twelve years ago, the spring your father built them three feet on
the shed." Mrs. Masters spoke firmly.
"Never mind, mother, I'm going to Boston, and I will come back. I'm
going to earn my livin'. I'm strong and willin', and as able as Dan
Prentiss. Ye needn't be scared, I ain't going yet. I'll finish up the
fall work fust. I'm going for the winter anyway, and Abbie'll come an'
live with you, mother--won't you, Abbie, dear? She's the only mother
you've got now. Your folks can spare you."