“As we are, you were going to say,” said she, placidly, finishing his sentence for him.
“I don’t think that you and father are ignorant,” he replied, looking confused; “but–”
“I understand what you mean, Tom. No; where your father and I were born, and where we were married, the country was thickly settled. All the children went to school, and there were no such cabins as the one we live in, but nice, framed houses of wood, stone, or brick.”
“Were there no poor people there?”
“Yes, as many as there are here,–a great many in the large cities,–and they found it very hard getting along.”
“Were yours and father’s folks very poor?” 80
“No; they were in comfortable circumstances.”
“Then why, mother, did you come west, and why do we live as we do now?”
As she did not at once reply, the lad, busy once more with his own thoughts, forgot that he had asked the question. He had often revolved the matter in his own mind, but had never before ventured to speak of it. His mother’s conversation with him, after his injury by the gun, had shown him the folly of his plan of leaving home clandestinely; but dissatisfaction with his lot grew with his growth and strengthened with his strength. It was a great mystery to him how his mother could consent to live so, for so many years. He would look at the black and crazy loggery, with its clay “chinking,” that was ever more cracking, and crumbling, and falling to the floor, leaving holes between the logs, through which the wind and rain entered; and the one rickety chair, and the rude benches and boxes for sitting accommodations, and the bedsteads, composed of rough oaken slabs, spiked at the head and side to the walls, and a rough post at the unsupported corner, and the cracked and rusted stove and leaky funnel; and then he would look at his mother, who, despite her coarse and dingy dress, seemed so superior to her condition; and the more he realized the contrast, the 81 more he marvelled. When he was younger, he had noticed this incongruity between his gentle mother and her wretched surroundings; and now he sometimes wished he could be insensible to it, it made him so unhappy. How restless he became–how like a caged eaglet, as he pondered the subject by night and by day–none knew save the watchful friend who moved so gently about the dark-lighted cabin, and kept so uncomplainingly at her tasks.
And his father seemed to him, in his way, as much of a mystery as his mother. Was he contented with the roving life he led? and did he never realize the deprivations of his wife and children? Did father and mother ever know brighter days? and were they never to see them again? And was it duty for him to keep on in the same way, sacrificing every rising aspiration and pure taste, and getting nothing in return but poor food and clothing, a comfortless home, and a mind undeveloped and unfurnished?