The young man's mind was of that flabby but fidgety kind which throws off ideas as a crab its shells, one after another--useless, imperfect moulds of itself. He came home to the mountain-hut in the first flush and triumph of authorship, bringing every newspaper-clipping in his pocket-book wherein a mention of his name had appeared. Richard, Hugh and his mother were never tired of hearing nor he of reading them. The poems and the clippings were left to be stored away--sacred relics--with the prize-books and medals. Peter set off to the West. "The bird in the bush is always out of sight with Peter," said his mother, whose hair was growing white and her voice feeble. He became a lawyer, a Congressman. When he made his first speech (on the snags in the Missouri River) he ran down to Carolina with a copy of it in _The Congressional Globe_. He had grown portly and red-faced, and talked in a strident voice. All the towns on his route received him as a conquering hero. "The Honorable Peter M. Boyer arrived last night," said the papers, "and received a magnificent public dinner at the ---- Hotel. The distinguished Senator, one of the favorite sons of the Old North State, is on his way to visit his parents at their summer retreat in Buncombe county." The distinguished and pompous Senator, at home in the hut, walked up and down with uneasy strides and anxious wandering eyes, just as he had done when a thin cub of a boy. The Senate Chamber evidently was but as narrow a cage for this alien beast as the life of a hunter had been. "I'm not satisfied," he told Hugh and Richard. "Politics are not the right groove for me. But I'll find it. I know that I have an intellect different from that of the ordinary man. You can't compare pure gold and brass, can you? Well, I've tested those fellows at Washington, and they are brass: they're pot-metal, sir! My brain," tapping his forehead, "will tell some day on the world: I'll make my mark. I'll hit the bull's eye yet." The Senator went back to Iowa. He was not returned for the next term. In a month or two his mother received a letter from him dated at London. "When I succeed," he said, "I will come back to you. I have given up politics and taken to literature. Literature is the only career in which my brain can reach its full development: all others compress and constrain me. I shall seek in the Old World for the recognition which the New did not yield me." All this was Greek to his mother and her sons, but they knew that it meant that he was gone. He never came back.