A spinster aunt, Miss Mary Emerson, came to see the family often. She urged the boys to stand high in their classes and thought it would not hurt them to do without play. She read all the fine books aloud to them that she could borrow. Once a caller found her telling the boys stories of great heroes, late at night, so that they might forget that they had been without food for a day and a half! They were as poor as that! Ralph began to go to school when he was three and so was able to enter Harvard College when he was fourteen. He did not have to pay for his room at the president's house because he did errands for him. And to pay for his meals, he waited on tables. That was working to get an education, wasn't it? Ralph did not find fault because he had to work all the time that he was not studying; he was thinking of his mother. When he won a prize of thirty dollars for declaiming well, he sent it to his mother as fast as the mails could take it and asked her to buy a shawl for herself. But she had to take it to buy food for the smaller children! Ralph used to tell his brothers that he could not think of anything in this world that would make him so happy as to be able some day to buy a house for his dear mother and to see her living easily. The other boys,--Waldo, Charles, Buckley, and Edward,--proved to be fine scholars, like Ralph, but they were never strong. They were always having to hurry south, or across the ocean to get over some illness. The truth is they did not have enough to eat when they were little. Old maid aunts can tell stories of heroes every night in the year, but that will never take the place of bread and potatoes, eggs and milk. Ralph's mother was very happy that he became a minister, and like his father, preached in Boston. After some years of preaching, he traveled in Europe. Then he lectured. He had a beautiful, clear voice, and all the things he told were so interesting that his name became famous, even before he wrote books. He settled in Concord, where Thoreau and Louisa May Alcott lived. He knew so much that by and by people called him "The Sage of Concord." He said he could never think very well sitting down. So when he wanted to write a poem, or sermon, or essay, (and you can hardly step into a New England home where there is not a book called _Emerson's Essays_) he put on his hat and went out for a walk. When he had walked three or four hours, he had usually decided just what he wanted to write down. On this account he generally went out alone. It was after a stroll in the woods near Concord, where the squirrels are thick, that he wrote the fable about the mountain and the squirrel. It begins this way: "The Mountain and the Squirrel Had a quarrel. The Mountain called the Squirrel 'Little Prig'--" [Illustration: He generally went out alone. _Page 221._]