They were big and slow-moving and serious as the tame bear which lay before the fire. At forty they always spoke of the house and farm as "my mother's, Mistress Boyer's," and meekly obeyed the old woman as she ordered them about with a sharp tongue. The instinct of kinship was as strong in them as in the old Jews. They would strike a bee-line for each other through the trackless wilderness when miles apart. This happened often. "How do I know where to find Richard?" said Hugh. "I don't know how I know. Something in my bones tells me." I think that when the youngest brother, Peter, left the mountains these older men suffered a kind of physical loss ever after, as if an arm or a leg had been taken from them. Peter was somewhere out in the world, living by his wits. God had given him precisely the same kind of wits as his brothers, but with a single added drop of uneasy leaven. He tumbled out of his cradle when he was a baby to see what lay beyond. He was thin, wizened, restless as a strange beast in a cage, though his brothers tirelessly puzzled their slow brains to soothe and satisfy him. When he was a boy he was wretched because he was not taken down into the valley or to far-off towns. His brothers were puzzled, dismayed. "It is the bird in the bush he wants," said his shrewd old mother. "The bird in the bush: he will never get it in his hand." When he was a boy of ten a party of geologists stopped at the log hut. There was much talk among them of the cities, of science and of politics. Peter Boyer thought he had found his bird in the bush. "I must have an education, and a good one, mother," he said. He was sent to Raleigh to school. Reports came home that no such boy had ever been taught there. His fellow-students prophesied that Carolina would some day be proud of her gifted son. Up in the mountains the two brothers ploughed, trapped, dug ginseng and climbed the peaks for balsam with hot, steady zeal to earn the little money which was needed to pay for his schooling. The bare cabin grew barer, mother and brothers went hungry many a day, but the pittance was always saved and sent to him. The boy came home in vacations with his moustache, his gorgeous scarf-pin and his quick, eager talk: he brought, too, piles of gilded prize-books, and once a silver medal. He did not care much for books or medal, but Richard wrapped each one carefully in paper and packed them in the big chest, and when the boy was gone the two broad-shouldered men would take them out at night and turn them over, and sometimes spell out a page, with a grave awe and delight. Presently, the lad sent back their money: he was pushing his own way--into college, into the University of Virginia, finally--great and culminating triumph!--into the newspapers. Poems (after Poe, as a matter of course), political diatribes in Johnsonese periods in _De Bow's Review_, essays, criticisms,--nothing came amiss to him.