"How I long for home!" she exclaimed, as she resumed her sewing by the fire. Little Joe came and stood by her knee and gave her his oft repeated blessing: "God help us and make His face to shine upon us." She kissed him and said: "Dear comforter! It shines upon me every time I hear you say those words." The little lad had observed the effect of the blessing on his mother in her moments of depression and many times his parroting had been the word in season. Now he returned to his play again, satisfied. "Would you mind if I called you mother?" Harry asked. "I shall be glad to have you do it if it gives you any comfort, Harry," she answered. She observed that there were tears in his eyes. "We are all very fond of you," she said, as she bent to her task. Then the boy told her the history of his morning--the talk with Bim, with the razor omitted from it; how he had met Abe and all that Abe had said to him as they sat together in the store. "Well, Harry, if she's such a fool, you're lucky to have found it out so soon," said Sarah. "She does little but ride the pony and play around with a gun. I don't believe she ever spun a hank o' yarn in her life. She'll get her teeth cut by and by. Abe is right We're always dropping our apples and feeling very bad about it, until we find out that there are lots of apples just as good. I'm that way myself. I guess I've made it harder for Samson crying over lost apples. I'm going to try to stop it." Then fell a moment of silence. Soon she said: "There's a bitter wind blowing and there's no great hurry about the rails, I guess. You sit here by the fire and read your book this forenoon. Maybe it will help you to find your work." So it happened that the events of Harry's morning found their place in the diary which Sarah and Samson kept. Long afterward Harry added the sentences about the razor. That evening Harry read aloud from the _Life of Henry Clay_, while Sarah and Samson sat listening by the fireside. It was the first of many evenings which they spent in a like fashion that winter. When the book was finished they read, on Abe's recommendation, Weem's _Life of Washington_. Every other Sunday they went down to the schoolhouse to hear John Cameron preach. He was a working man, noted for good common sense, who talked simply and often effectively of the temptations of the frontier, notably those of drinking, gaming and swearing. One evening they went to a debate in the tavern on the issues of the day, in which Abe won the praise of all for an able presentation of the claim of Internal Improvements. During that evening Alexander Ferguson declared that he would not cut his hair until Henry Clay became president, the news of which resolution led to a like insanity in others and an age of unexampled hairiness on that part of the border.