The squatter's son looked about him with a dissatisfied air. "I do wish," he soliloquized, "that I could see something of the world, and do something for myself. Here we've been changing around from one place to another, doing nothing but raise a few potatoes and a little corn, living in a miserable cabin, where there are no schools, and scarcely any neighbors. It's too bad to spend all our days so. I believe we were made for something better; and, as the minister told us Sunday, we ought to try and be somebody, and not float along as the stick on the stream. I'm sure it isn't, and never was, to mother's mind; and, as to father--" And here he stopped and pondered, as if trying to solve a mystery, and in a style that would have been pronounced philosophic, had he been a college professor--scratched his head. Then, with his ragged sleeve, he wiped the sweat from his brow, leaving a streak of black that made that part of his face present quite a different appearance from what it did, reader, when you and I noticed it a moment ago. And going to the cabin, he returned with a rickety basket, and, commencing at the lower end of the field, began picking up the potatoes that had been left drying in the sun. A goodly crop had the little patch produced; for the vegetable decays and fertilizing rains and snows of centuries had covered the prairie with a dressing with which art could not compete, and it was more difficult not to get a harvest from the seed sown than to get one. The rows of hills were covered with the bountiful returns brought up to the light of day by Tom's well-used hoe. It was not, however, the size, quality, or number of the potatoes that most interested Tom just then. The fact that they were all out of the ground; that the corn was cut and stacked, and the pumpkins ready to be housed; that the fall work could be finished by that afternoon's sun-setting,--stirred him strangely; for he had of late begun to question the future, to learn what it had in store for him. He had come to realize, in a degree, that that future would be very much what he chose to make it. And serious dissatisfaction with the past and the present filled his heart with disquiet.