It was, take it all in all, a grim, gaunt, strange place in which to fix a home. It was there, however, in the midst of such sterile surroundings, that the next five years of Willard's life were mainly passed. There were no external influences brought to bear upon this portion of his existence that were not harsh and wild and stern. His father, honest even to the verge of fanaticism, was letting his heart corrode to bitterness under the sense of hopeless indebtedness. The churlish fields attached to the place offered but a grudging reward for the hardest labor. There was no hope of his acquiring a profession or even an education beyond the scant opportunity of Allen Wight's school, unless he himself could earn the means to pay for it. Still he was neither discouraged nor without hope. Instead of sinking under this accumulation of difficulties, his moral fibre was rendered more robust, and with it his physical strength and usefulness developed daily. Thus a year sped on, and at the end of that time his father, as one means of adding something to his scanty resources, obtained the job of hauling a quantity of iron ore from the ore beds near Little York to a forge and furnace at Fullerville. Willard with an ox-team and his uncle Henry with a span of fine horses, were employed for the most part to do the actual hauling. By this time Willard was quite familiar with the management of horses, and he had also learned to drive oxen, so that at the age of thirteen he worked with his ox-team as regularly and almost as efficiently as any of his grown-up uncles or even his father. The management of an ox-team, by the way, is quite different from that of horses, and at times it becomes very troublesome business, requiring for its successful accomplishment the very nicest admixture of courage, coolness and discretion. Willard, however, with the self-reliance that always characterizes a boy of his age, never for a moment doubted that he was adequate to the task, and as he had been placed in charge of a very fine yoke of oxen, took much pride in driving them in the same manner as he would have driven a span of horses, seated on the top of his load upon the wagon instead of being on foot and close by their heads, as prudence would have taught an older driver to do. The truth is, that if there was any human being before whom the boy delighted to exhibit himself as doing a manly part in his little circle of existence, that being was Henry Glazier.