Tom's memory had been active for a few days. How like yesterday it seemed, when he was a little child, and his father, getting together money enough, bought a horse and wagon, and, putting the family in the vehicle, started out prospecting for a new home farther from the advancing waves of civilization! How many similar expeditions had they taken since, and how painfully had their experiences illustrated the saying, "A rolling stone gathers no moss"! But roll Mr. Jones would. Tom knew this too well. It was, indeed, viewed in one aspect, an easy way to get on, this going in one's own conveyance from place to place of Uncle Sam's unsettled lands; this living off the country, gypsying in the woods and on the prairies; this two thirds savage and one third civilized mode of putting a growing family through the world; and if you were to see Mr. Jones seated in the emigrant wagon, reins in hand and pipe in mouth, or with shouldered rifle on the track of a deer, you would say that such a life was eminently agreeable to him. Every man is made for something; and you would say that he was cut out for a wandering frontier loafer, who gets his subsistence by doing the least possible work in the easiest possible manner, and hunting and fishing. A horse and wagon, or extemporized log cabin, for a shelter; tools enough for the simplest tilling of the soil, and furniture for the rudest housekeeping and clothing; the making over, by the industrious wife, of clothes bought "some time back,"--such was the way the Joneses lived. Putting up a small log house by the bank of a river for the sake of the fish, and near a forest for the game, with "a strip of clean prairie" for "garden sarce,"--there they might remain for a year or two; then you would be quite sure to find the immigrant friend looking discontented, and expressing a wish to "sell his claim." "It's growing so crowded with folks coming into the country, I can't go three miles without stumbling against a shanty or a house; and cart tracks are getting so plenty, I can't stand it. I must pull up stakes, and go farther on to find a place to breathe in." And, perchance, realizing a trifle for his claim and improvements, Dobbin is hitched anew into the crazy old wagon. The broken crockery, and leaky black tea-pot, and ancient cooking-stove--the pipe of the latter running up through the wagon-top--are once more aboard, wife and children packed in, and the uneasy frontiersman is pushing out again towards solitude. Tom had been reviewing this bit of family history more in detail, and much more vividly than we have now done. The result was a feeling of disgust, and a resolution to break away from such a life, and an endeavor for something higher.