I murmur under moon and stars
In brambly wildernesses;
I linger by my shingly bars;
I loiter round my cresses;
And out again I curve and flow
To join the brimming river,
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on for ever.
Tennyson
As good almost kill a man as kill a good book. Many a man lives a burden to the earth, but a good book is the precious life blood of a master-spirit.
Milton
"DO SEEK THEIR MEAT FROM GOD"
There was a solitary cabin in the thick of the woods a mile or more from the nearest neighbour, a substantial frame house in the midst of a large and well-tilled clearing. The owner of the cabin, a shiftless fellow who spent his days for the most part at the corner tavern three miles distant, had suddenly grown disgusted with a land wherein one must work to live, and had betaken himself with his seven-year-old boy to seek some more indolent clime.
The five-year-old son of the prosperous owner of the frame house and the older boy had been playmates. The little boy, unaware of his comrade's departure, had stolen away, late in the afternoon, along the lonely stretch of wood road, and had reached the cabin only to find it empty. As the dusk gathered, he grew afraid to start for home and crept trembling into the cabin, whose door would not stay shut. Desperate with fear and loneliness, he lifted up his voice piteously. In the terrifying silence, he listened hard to hear if anyone or anything were coming. Then again his shrill childish wailings arose, startling the unexpectant night, and piercing the forest depths, even to the ears of two great panthers which had set forth to seek their meat from God.