Another time, it was not the warning bark of Rover, but the merest accident, that rescued the boy from a situation as perilous. His aunt, going into the little barn near the house, to look for eggs, saw him sitting directly under one of the plow-horses in a stall, watching with interest the movements of the animal's fore-feet, as they regularly pawed the ground. On being taken back to the house, little Dick was made to understand that solitary expeditions were forbidden, and in so sharp a manner that thereafter he rarely violated orders. He was carefully watched against the recurrence of temptation to travel. A constant source of terror to the mother, on Dick's account, was the nearness of the river, whose bed lay a few rods to the south, not far from the foot of a steep bank which fell from the piece of ground on which the house stood. This piece of ground was surrounded by a rude fence, and the boy spent many a longing quarter of an hour in looking through the rails at the river that flowed gently, with constant murmur, below. Between the river and the bank ran what some called a road, what may have formerly been an Indian trail, and what in Dick's time was really but a rough path for horses. It led from the farms farther back up the river, behind the azure mountains at the west, down to the more thickly settled country beyond the mountains at the east, and afar it joined the road to Lancaster and Philadelphia. The boy's parents early taught him his letters, for the elder Wetheral had brought a few books with his meagre baggage from the old country, and had since acquired, from some of the settlers of the best class, a few more, two by dying bequest, two by gift, and four or five by purchase and trade. With the contents of some of these, Dick first became acquainted through his father's reading aloud on Sundays and rainy days, before the kitchen fire. One of these was Capt. John Smith's account of his marvellous achievements. Strangely enough, or rather naturally enough, the parts of this book that most interested Dick were not where Smith told of his adventures with Indians in America, but where he related his doings in Europe; for Indians and primitive surroundings were familiar matters to Dick, whereas accounts of the old world had for him all that charm which a boy reared in the midst of civilization finds in pictures of wilderness life. A few of the books were illustrated with prints, which the boy studied by the hour. One of these books was an odd volume of a history of the world, and contained mainly that part which related to France. It had crude engravings of two or three palaces, a few kings, three or four queens, a Catholic killing a Huguenot in front of the Church of St. Germain l'Auxerrois, a royal hunt, and the Pont Neuf, backed by the towers of Notre Dame and flanked by buildings along the Seine. These rough pictures, thanks to some mysterious cause or other, exercised on little Dick a potent fascination.