showed her faith in my capability. "Were you a very poor man," she said one day, "there would be more hope of you if you had to work for your daily bread you would have better appetite for it. There is really something in you; if you could only in any way be set to work! Activity, it seems to me, is the one thing needful.”

I would willingly have staid longer here, but I felt that I had no right; and my host, having learned that I felt little interest in the many societies of which he was member, began to consider me a 'cumberer of the ground and to wish me away; or, at any rate, such were my suspicions; and I departed.

not

While I travel on toward Pebblebrook, the reader shall learn all that is needful (perhaps a little more) of the origin of the Harding family. Be not alarmed, good friend; we will not go far on the way toward Adam; even so far as Noah and his sons. I will only show its transition from the old world to the new, and note its first appearance here.

CHAPTER II.

THE HARDING FAMILY.

OLD John Harding was an Englishman of the toughest kind; unyielding, impenetrably, he had few social, kindly qualities, and therefore few friends in the little town on the coast of Cornwall, where he dwelt. He was a fisherman of indomitable courage and perseverance. Cold nor storm kept him on shore; when his little boat could live on the rough sea, he could. Like a water dog, he shook the salt spray from his shaggy coat, and to the threatening frowns of a stormy sky he showed a front of hardy defi ance. In sturdy endurance of outward storms he resembled the adamantine rocks of his own sea-shore; in warring with such, therefore, he did well enough; but not so well when he dealt with his fellow-men. It availed him little that he brought more fish to land than his fellows, for his obstinacy in demanding what he called the real value of the article he offered for sale, often left his fish to spoil on his hands. In an overstocked market he was the most unsuccessful of salesmen; for he had neither learned to play with circumstances, nor to yield cheerfully to the inevitable. The life of him was a gnarly scrub-tree rooted in rocky ground, wearing, in sunshine and in storm, the same look of crabbed indiffer

ence. By his side stood one of the same species which great Nature had transplanted there. His wife was a hard-working woman, doing much unnecessarily, indeed uselessly. Whatsoever her hands found to do, she did with all her might; but there was no skillful adaptation of means to ends; a matter as requisite in the business of a household as in the government of a nation.

This hard-handed couple had one son, not unlike his father, but of somewhat more genial nature. Through many generations the Being of the father had come to him under sternest pressures, and in him had reached the last fortress of humanity, which is obstinate endurance of evil; further, in that direction, it could not go and still be human. In the son, therefore, this Being moved slightly in an opposite direction, and began to expand. He looked out on the world from his narrow cave, and the soul of him yearned for freedom. In that little town there was talk of a land in the west, where the poorest man could be free. Ignorance is ever prone to magnify the distant good; and this America, in the minds of these rude people, hovered as a heaven on earth. The young man's eyes of hope turned hitherward, and he told his wishes to his parents. The old man pondered the matter long in grimmest silence, and at last said, "Go, boy; I can give you little more than liberty to follow your own will. If there be, for the poor man, a better land than this, seek it out; a worse one you can hardly find. I have borne much in this life, and I can bear more; I can part with you; you may go."

There was little preparation for this long journey over the sea, for the worldly goods of the young man were mostly, like those of the beast of the field, on his back.

The hard rock, when smitten by Aaron's rod, yielded

water; and beneath the stroke of affliction these hard natures melted. There were tears and wailing in that fisherman's hut when the son departed, for the parents had little hope of meeting him again on earth. Their life lay, as it were, behind them, a barren, rocky waste; but the young man's lay before him, and he promised to visit them again.

The parting over, he sailed across the ocean in a little vessel, the smallest of those which venture on a voyage so long. There were storms and calms; adverse winds and fair; wearisome days and nights, and a longing for the pleasant land. The snow-covered shores of New England at length appeared; but they looked all too desolate for a heaven on earth; and James Harding landed in the principal sea-port without the greeting of a friend. In the streets busy men walked to and fro on their many errands; but no one regarded him. The smoke of many a chimney proclaimed a cheerful fireside, but for him there was no home. He found however an humble dwelling-place suited to his means of payment, and looked around him, day after day, on prospects nowise cheering; for at this inclement season the daylaborer found little employment. His little stock of money was soon exhausted, and want, in its sternest shape, stared him in the face; but he was not one to die without an effort. He wandered away to a little settlement on the sea-shore, and found work, the boon he asked for, in a shipyard. In few years he learned to use skillfully the carpenter's tools, and spent no hour idly; not the day only, but part of the night, was devoted to toil. Such unceasing labor is seldom without returns; and James, seeing that his earnings would pay the way of more than himself, married. He built a rude man's nest, and at

stated intervals, say of two years or less, little Hardings, one after another, came wondrously into being; not weak and puny things, but quite tough, knotty, gnarly, without beauty or grace, but strong. James Harding and his wife, in their old age, saw eight of their brood running out of doors mainly intent on the gratification of animal appetites; always working, but, for the most part, towards some selfish end. The three daughters changed their family name, in a very common way, and we lose sight of them here. They are little streamlets, these daughters, always running off from one recognised, visible life-stream into another; thus giving to the whole of human life a general character; making it a human family.

In the attainment of worldly wealth it may be said that three of these brothers prospered; but with increasing wealth much evil unfolded itself. The blessed man is not he who can get possession of many outward things, but he who can use well what he gets, be it little or much. These Hardings were grasping in getting, selfish in using, obstinate in keeping all kinds of victuals; for, in truth, all they got had value in their eyes only because it could be converted into such. Call them not sinners to be condemned without mercy; consider, rather, how their life had come to them through want of every kind, and pity them. A stern, narrow moralist, looking only on the then present, and seeing the hard grasping nature of those men, might have said it had been better they had never been born. I cannot think so; for to me is given to see another present. Did not the Hardings of this day all come from those obstinate, hateful old men? indeed from the tough old man of the little town on the coast of Cornwall, who caught fish in stormy weather, and had few friends? How much lies wrapped up in the small-seem