“I never told you, I think, about my own career. I don’t talk about it often, for it makes a fellow sound like Mr. Bounderby in _Hard Times_--the chap who was always bragging about being a self-made man.” “No; I’d like to hear about it,” said Horace. “The first I remember of you was at the seminary here.” “Well, I was only fifteen years old then, and all the story I’ve got dates before that. I can just remember when we moved into this part of the world--coming from Orange County. My father had bought a small farm some fifteen miles from here, over near Tyre, and we moved onto it in the spring. I was about five. I had an older brother, Ezra, and two younger ones. There was a good deal of hard work to do, and father tried to do it all himself, and so by harvest time he was laid up; and the men who came and got in the crops on shares robbed us down to the ground. When winter came, father had to get up, whether he was well enough or not, and chop wood for the market, to make up for the loss on harvesting. One evening he didn’t come home, and the team was away all night, too, with mother never going to bed at all, and then before daybreak taking Ezra to carry a lantern, and starting through the drifts for our patch of woods. They found my father dead in the forest, crushed under a falling tree. “I suppose it was a terrible winter. I only dimly remember it, or the summer that followed. When another winter was coming on, my mother grew frightened. Try the best she knew how, she was worse off every month than she had been the month before. To pay interest on the mortgage, she had to sell what produce we had managed to get in, keeping only a bare moiety for ourselves, and to give up the woodland altogether. Soon the roads would be blocked; there was not enough fodder for what stock we had, nor even food enough for us. We had no store of fuel, and no means of staving off starvation. Under stern compulsion, solely to secure a home for her boys, my mother married a well-to-do farmer in the neighborhood--a man much older than herself, and the owner of a hundred-acre farm and of the mortgages on our own little thirty acres. “I suppose he meant to be a just man, but he was as hard as a steel bloom. He was a prodigious worker, and he made us all work, without rest or reward. When I was nine years old, narrow-chested and physically delicate, I had to get up before sunrise for the milking, and then work all day in the hay-field, making and cocking, and obliged to keep ahead of the wagon under pain of a flogging. Three years of this I had, and I recall them as you might a frightful nightmare. I had some stray schooling--my mother insisted upon that--but it wasn’t much; and I remember that the weekly paper was stopped after that because Ezra and I wasted too much time in reading it.