"Then why, mother, did you come west, and why do we live as we do now?" As she did not at once reply, the lad, busy once more with his own thoughts, forgot that he had asked the question. He had often revolved the matter in his own mind, but had never before ventured to speak of it. His mother's conversation with him, after his injury by the gun, had shown him the folly of his plan of leaving home clandestinely; but dissatisfaction with his lot grew with his growth and strengthened with his strength. It was a great mystery to him how his mother could consent to live so, for so many years. He would look at the black and crazy loggery, with its clay "chinking," that was ever more cracking, and crumbling, and falling to the floor, leaving holes between the logs, through which the wind and rain entered; and the one rickety chair, and the rude benches and boxes for sitting accommodations, and the bedsteads, composed of rough oaken slabs, spiked at the head and side to the walls, and a rough post at the unsupported corner, and the cracked and rusted stove and leaky funnel; and then he would look at his mother, who, despite her coarse and dingy dress, seemed so superior to her condition; and the more he realized the contrast, the more he marvelled. When he was younger, he had noticed this incongruity between his gentle mother and her wretched surroundings; and now he sometimes wished he could be insensible to it, it made him so unhappy. How restless he became--how like a caged eaglet, as he pondered the subject by night and by day--none knew save the watchful friend who moved so gently about the dark-lighted cabin, and kept so uncomplainingly at her tasks. And his father seemed to him, in his way, as much of a mystery as his mother. Was he contented with the roving life he led? and did he never realize the deprivations of his wife and children? Did father and mother ever know brighter days? and were they never to see them again? And was it duty for him to keep on in the same way, sacrificing every rising aspiration and pure taste, and getting nothing in return but poor food and clothing, a comfortless home, and a mind undeveloped and unfurnished? Seated on the end of a box, shelling corn by drawing the ears against the back of a broken scythe, he had been working and thinking through the evening, while the children slept, with no one to notice his absent-minded labor but his ever-wakeful mother. "I will not endure it," he mentally exclaimed; and, by way of emphasis, he drew the ear of corn he held against the edge of the scythe with unusual force, at the same instant springing to his feet with a cry of pain, and a finger in his mouth, upsetting his seat, and sending the contents of the box rolling across the floor, and into the gaping cracks. "O, I've scraped my finger awfully!" he said, with grimaces that added nothing to his personal attractions. "Why, how did you do it, my son?" asked the mother, although she knew very well.