sore. Soon after, a moose treed him on the trail and held him
there for quite half a day. Later he had to help thrash and was
laid up with the measles. Then came rain and flooded flats that
turned him off the trail. Years after he used to say that work and
weather, and sickness and distance, and even the beasts of the
field and wood, resisted him in the way of learning.

He went to school at Hillsborough that winter. His time, which
Allen gave him in the summer, had yielded some forty-five dollars.
He hired a room at thirty-five cents a week. Mary Allen bought him
a small stove and sent to him, in the sleigh, dishes, a kettle,
chair, bed, pillow, and quilt, and a supply of candles.

She surveyed him proudly, as he was going away that morning in
December,

"Folks may call ye han'some," she said. "They'd like to make fool
of ye, but you go on 'bout yer business an' act as if ye didn't
hear."

He had a figure awkward, as yet, but fast shaping to comeliness.
Long, light hair covered the tops of his ears and fell to his
collar. His ruddy cheeks were a bit paler that morning; the curve
in his lips a little drawn; his blue eyes had begun to fill and the
dimple in his chin to quiver, slightly, as he kissed her who had
been as a mother to him. But he went away laughing.

Many have seen the record in his diary of those lank and busy days.
The Saturday of his first week at school he wrote as follows:--