“There,—there, I'll hear that sermon no more. I'd not barter the freedom of my own unfettered thoughts, as they come and go, in hours of listless idleness, for all the success you ever promised me. There are men toil elevates,—me it wearies to depression, and brings no compensation in the shape of increased power. Mine is an unrewarding clay,—that's the whole of it. Cultivation only develops the rank weeds which are deep sown in the soil. I'd like to travel,—to visit some new land, some scene where all association with the past shall be broken. What say you?”
“I'm ready, and at your orders,” said Traynor, closing his book.
“East or west, then, which shall it be? If sometimes my heart yearns for the glorious scenes of Palestine, full of memories that alone satisfy the soul's longings, there are days when I pant for the solitude of the vast savannas of the New World. I feel as if to know one's self thoroughly, one's nature should be tested by the perils and exigencies of a life hourly making some demand on courage and ingenuity. The hunter's life does this. What say you,—shall we try it?”
“I 'm ready,” was the calm reply.
“We have means for such an enterprise, have we not? You told me, some short time past, that nearly the whole of our last year's allowance was untouched.”
“Yes, it's all there to the good,” said Billy; “a good round sum too.”
“Let us get rid of all needless equipment, then,” cried Massy, “and only retain what beseems a prairie life. Sell everything, or give it away at once.”
“Leave all that to me,—I'll manage everything; only say when you make up your mind.”
“But it is made up. I have resolved on the step. Few can decide so readily; for I leave neither home nor country behind.”
“Don't say that,” burst in Billy; “here's myself, the poorest crayture that walks the earth, that never knew where he was born or who nursed him, yet even to me there's the tie of a native land,—there's the soil that reared warriors and poets and orators that I heard of when a child, and gloried in as a man; and, better than that, there's the green meadows and the leafy valleys where kind-hearted men and women live and labor, spakin' our own tongue and feelin' our own feelin's, and that, if we saw to-morrow, we 'd know were our own,—heart and hand our own. The smell of the yellow furze, under a griddle of oaten bread, would be sweeter to me than all the gales of Araby the Blest; for it would remind me of the hearth I had my share of, and the roof that covered me when I was alone in the world.”