“Now, Dan, you must try to do your best to-night. There will be heaps o’ people at that speaking, and Squire Barnard’s hall will be full, and I fear how you might be kind o’ shakey when you see ’em all looking at yer, boy. But be brave and powerful smart to-night, Dan, and maybe, some day, somebody’ll do ye a good turn, and ye might get a bit more learning.” These were the words that broke the deep quietness of a strangely impressive hour in a home freighted with ill fortune and cursed by nearly every event. It was in the days of early American life when Puritan simplicity and colonial customs held society in a more natural state, and allowed the highest and lowest a more ready approach. But the home of Dan Kenashton, though decent, was the simplest of the simple, and the most unpretentious of the unpretending. And on that November evening long ago, when, in other home-circles the “husking bee,” the evening kitchen party, and other ancestral pastimes told of pleasantly passing days, in this there lurked a legend of something wrong. The roughly hewn timbers which presented their ugly faces to the two inmates, in the two solitary rooms of this weird old cot seemed to speak curses on whomsoever was within. Even the dusty old motto, “God Bless Our Home,” which hung over the crude board shelf, seemed to bear an ill-omened import. Beside it was a well kept picture, a battle scene. Brave men were defending a fortification, amid snow and sleet and fire and lead, against an insidious attack by the Muskigo tribe on New Year’s eve. ’Neath the feet of those still contending lay the bleeding bodies of those who had fought their last. Did this have any special meaning in that home? If so, surely war is honorable, and to die in loyal defence leaves not a stigma upon one’s posterity. An old flintlock musket stood in the corner. It had not the appearance of recent use; the hammer was rusty and flintless; the bayonet was blunt and rusty, too;—but there it stood as it had stood for years, becoming such a part of the house that Dan never wondered at its use nor questioned its origin. Hanging to it was an old canteen. They were certainly relics of war, but war was common in those days, and the sight of arms familiar. A few antique pieces of furniture and the old spinning-wheel completed the scene in this strange, scanty home. [Illustration: Rifle] Dan, in his honest, quiet way, replied to the simple, yet feeling, words of his mother, “Indeed I’ll do all I can to win the prize, but it’s little use, you know I hav’n’t very good clothes to wear, and it ’pears to me that Deacon Ackley and Squire Barnard himself, and the other judges, don’t like me very well, and besides, I haven’t had any help until I spoke the piece to General Brockaway to-day.” “What, how did that happen, Dan?” asked the mother, startled with a sudden impulse of rage at the mention of that name.