All my life I have felt that Nature had some grudge against my father. If she had made him a simple miller, content when he was grinding corn and dipping the small toll from the farmer’s grist, he might have lived a fairly useful, happy life. But day after day and year after year he was compelled to walk the short and narrow path between the little house and the decaying mill, while his mind was roving over scenes of great battles, decayed empires, dead languages, and the starry heavens above. To his dying day he lived in a walking trance; and his books and their wondrous stories were more real to him than the turning water-wheel, the sacks of wheat and corn, and the cunning, soulless farmers who dickered and haggled about his hard-earned toll. Whether or not my father had strong personal ambitions, I really never knew; no doubt he had, but years of work and resignation had taught him to deny them even to himself, and slowly and pathetically he must have let go his hold upon that hope and ambition which alone make the thoughtful man cling fast to life. In all the country round, no man knew so much of books as he, and no man knew less of life. The old parson and the doctor were almost the only neighbors who seemed able even to understand the language that he spoke. I remember now, when his work was done, how religiously he went to his little study with his marvellous books, and worked and read far into the night, stopping only to encourage and help his children in the tasks that they were ever anxious to neglect and shirk. My bedroom, with its two beds and generally four occupants, opened directly from his study door; and no matter how often I went to sleep and awakened in the night, I could see a little streak of lamplight at the bottom of the door that opened into his room, which showed me that he was still dwelling in the fairy-lands of which his old volumes told. He was no longer there in the morning, and this was usually the first time that I missed him in my waking moments after I had gone to bed. Often, too, he wrote, sometimes night after night for weeks together; but I never knew what it was that he put down,—no doubt his hopes and dreams and loves and doubts and fears, as men have ever done since time began, as they will ever do while time shall last, and as I am doing now; but these poor dreams of his were never destined to see the light of day. Perhaps, with no one to tell him that they were good, he despaired about their worth, as so many other doubting souls have done before and since. It is not likely, indeed, that any publisher could have been found ready to transform his poor cramped writing into print. Whatever may have been the case, if I could only find the pages that he wrote I would print them now with his name upon the title-page, and pay for them myself.