Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 2.djvu/172

 Western State when it was almost a wilderness, cleared for himself a farm, and built a log-house. The toil and privations of frontier life soon wrought their natural effects upon Mrs. Davenport's delicate constitution. She fell into a rapid decline and died. Her husband was seized with a fever the summer after, and died also, leaving two children, Mark and Anna. The blacksmith had six motherless children of his own; but he set out for the West, and brought the orphans home with him. He thenceforth treated them like his own offspring, manifesting a woman's tenderness as well as a father's care for them.

Mark was a comely lad, with the yellow curling hair, the clear blue eyes, and the marked symmetry of features that belonged to his uncle. He had an inborn love of reading and study; he was first in his class at every winter's school, and had devoured all the books within his reach. Then he borrowed an old copy of Adam's Latin Grammar from Dr. Greenfield, and committed the rules to memory without a teacher. That was his introduction to the classics.

But Mr. Hardwick believed in the duty and excellence of work, and Mark, as well as his cousins, was trained to make himself useful. So the Grammar was studied and Virgil read at chance intervals, when a storm interrupted out-door work, or while waiting at the upper mill for a grist, or of nights at the shop by the light of the forge fire. The paradigms were committed to memory with an anvil accompaniment; and long after, he never could scan a line of Homer, especially the oft-repeated

[Greek: Tou d'au | Taelema | chos pep | numenos | antion | aeuda],

without hearing the ringing blows of his uncle's hammer keeping tune to the verse.

At sixteen years of age he was ready to enter college, though he had received little aid in his studies, except when some schoolmaster who was versed in the humanities chanced to be hired for the winter. But his uncle was not able to support him at any respectable university, and the lad's prospects for such an education as he desired seemed to be none of the best.

At this point an incident occurred which changed the course of our hero's life, and as it will serve to explain how he came to give his notes to Mr. Kinloch, on which the administrators are about to bring suit, it should properly be related here.

Mark Davenport was at work on a farm a short distance from the village. He hoped to enter college the following autumn, and he knew no means to obtain money for a portion of his outfit except by the labor of his hands. He could get twenty dollars a month for the summer season. Sixty, or possibly seventy dollars!--what ideas of opulence were suggested by the sound of those words!

It was a damp, drizzly day; there was not a settled rain, yet it was too wet to work in the corn. Mark was therefore busy in picking loose stones from the surface of a field cultivated the year before, and now "seeded down" for grass. A portion of the field bordered on a pond, and the alders upon its margin formed a dense green palisade, over which might be seen the gray surface of the water freckled by the tiny drops of rain. Low clouds trailed their gauzy robes over the top of Mount Quobbin, and flecks of mist swept across the blue sides of the loftier Mount Elizabeth.

"What a perfect day for fishing!" thought Mark. "If I had my tackle here, and a frog's leg or a shiner, I would soon have a pickerel out from under those lilypads."

But he kept at work, and, having his basket full of stones, carried them to the pond and plumped them in. A growl of anger came up from behind the bushes.

"What the Devil do you mean, you lubber, throwing stones over here to scare away the fish?"

The bushes parted at the same time, showing Hugh Branning sitting in the end of his boat, and apparently just ready to fling out his line.