‘Where are they?’ asked Phœbe.
‘She is gone to her sister at Buffalo. The price of the land will help them on for a little while there, and if I can get on in engineering, I shall be able to keep them in some comfort. I began to think the poor boys were doomed to have no education at all.’
‘Did you always live at Lakeville?’
‘No; I grew up in a much more civilized part of the world. We had a beautiful farm upon Lake Ontario, and raised the best crops in the neighbourhood. It was not till we got entangled in the Land Company, five years ago, that we were sold up; and we have been sinking deeper ever since—till the old cow and I had the farm all to ourselves.’
‘How could you bear it?’ asked Phœbe.
‘Well! it was rather dreary to see one thing going after another. But somehow, after I lost my own black mare, poor Minnehaha, I never cared so much for any of the other things. Once for all, I got ashamed of my own childish selfishness. And then, you see, the worse things were, the stronger the call for exertion. That was the great help.’
‘Oh, yes, I can quite imagine that—I know it,’ said Phœbe, thinking how exertion had helped her through her winter of trial. ‘You never were without some one to work for.’
‘No; even when my father was gone’—and his voice was less clear—‘there was the less time to feel the change, when the boys and their mother had nothing but me between them and want.’
‘After a fashion,’ he said, smiling. ‘Spade-husbandry alone is very poor earth-scratching; and I don’t really know whether, between that and my gun, we could have got through this winter.’