The walk from Kimble to Tafton, I presently found, could be shortened by taking a path through the forest; and I was soon panting up the hillside, grateful for the long twilight which promised to see me safe, before the darkness, to my destination. On the way I fell in with a young quarryman, whose home was near Tafton, and who willingly became my guide. He was only sixteen, but already he had worked for four years at his trade. His gaunt, angular body showed plainly the marks of arrested development, when the growth of the boy had hardened prematurely into an almost deformed figure of a confirmed laborer. He lunged clumsily beside me, and was inclined to be taciturn at first; but he warmed presently to readier speech, and talked frankly of his work and manner of life. At twelve he had been taken from school and sent to the quarry to help his father support a growing family. And then his days had settled into a ceaseless round of hard work, from which there was no escape for him until he should be twenty-one, an age which appeared to his perception at an almost infinite distance. His attitude to his present circumstances was not a resentful one. He seemed to think it most natural that he should help in the family support; or, rather, no other possibility seemed to occur to him. It was soon apparent, too, that his chiefest hope and ambition, with reference to his ultimate freedom from that necessity, were centred in a possible return to school advantages. He spoke of his efforts to study after work hours, and of the hardness of such a course, and owned to the fear of insurmountable difficulties in the future. His reticence was gone now, and he was speaking with hearty freedom, and with his eyes all alight with the dream of his life. I told him something of the increased opportunities of education for men who must make their own way, and of how many men I had known who had supported themselves through college. We parted at the edge of the forest, where we reached his home, a frail shell of a shanty, standing upon stumps of felled trees, and he was welcomed by the sight of his mother, chopping wood at the roadside, and a troop of ragged children playing about the open door. At nightfall, on the next evening, I entered Wilkesbarre, but I got so far only by virtue of a long lift in a farmer's cart, which carried me, by a stroke of great good fortune, over much the longest part of the day's journey.