Old Ephraim lacked the cunning for that kind of success. He was lame and slow, tending toward stoutness, and having a film over one eye; and Samuel knew that the boarders made fun of him, even while they devoured his food and took advantage of him. This was the first bitterness of Samuel's life; for he knew that within old Ephraim's bosom was the heart of a king. Once the boy had heard him in the room beneath his attic, talking with one of the boarders, a widow with a little daughter of whom the old man was fond. “I've had a feeling, ma'am,” he was saying, “that somehow you might be in trouble. And I wanted to say that if you can't spare this money, I would rather you kept it; for I don't need it now, and you can send it to me when things are better with you.” That was Ephraim Prescott's way with his boarders; and so he did not grow in riches as fast as he grew in soul. Ephraim's wife had taught him to read the Bible. He read it every night, and on Sundays also; and if what he was reading was sublime poetry, and a part of the world's best literature, the old man did not know it. He took it all as having actual relationship to such matters as trading horses and feeding boarders. And he taught Samuel to take it that way also; and as the boy grew up there took root within him a great dismay and perplexity, that these moral truths which he read in the Book seemed to count for so little in the world about him. Besides the Bible and his mother, Ephraim taught his son one other great thing; that was America. America was Samuel's country, the land where his fathers had died. It was a land set apart from all others, for the working out of a high and wonderful destiny. It was the land of Liberty. For this whole armies of heroic men had poured out their heart's blood; and their dream was embodied in institutions which were almost as sacred as the Book itself. Samuel learned hymns which dealt with these things, and he heard great speeches about them; every Fourth of July that he could remember he had driven out to the courthouse to hear one, and he was never in the least ashamed when the tears came into his eyes.