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388 fated; the benevolent State had in its great wisdom decreed otherwise.

In the village of Saddle Meadows there was an institution, half common-school and half academy, but mainly supported by a general ordinance and financial provision of the government. Here, not only were the rudiments of an English education taught, but likewise some touch of belles-lettres, and composition, and that great American bulwark and bore—elocution. On the high-raised, stage platform of the Saddle Meadows Academy, the sons of the most indigent day-labourers were wont to drawl out the fiery revolutionary rhetoric of Patrick Henry, or gesticulate impetuously through the soft cadences of Drake's 'Culprit Fay.' What wonder, then, that of Saturdays, when there was no elocution and poesy, these boys should grow melancholy and disdainful over the heavy, plodding handles of dung-forks and hoes?

At the age of fifteen, the ambition of Charles Millthorpe was to be either an orator, or a poet; at any rate, a great genius of one sort or other. He recalled the ancestral Knight, and indignantly spurned the plough. Detecting in him the first germ of this inclination, old Millthorpe had very seriously reasoned with his son; warning him against the evils of his vagrant ambition. Ambition of that sort was either for undoubted genius, rich boys, or poor boys, standing entirely alone in the world, with no one relying upon them. Charles had better consider the case; his father was old and infirm; he could not last very long; he had nothing to leave behind him but his plough and his hoe; his mother was sickly; his sisters pale and delicate; and finally, life was a fact, and the winters in that part of the country exceedingly bitter and long. Seven months out of the twelve the pastures bore nothing, and all cattle must be fed in the barns. But Charles was a boy; advice often seems the most