Page:The Father Confessor, Stories of Danger and Death.djvu/224

214 fierceness and passion, the brown would seem only waiting an opportunity to melt into tenderness and affection. Yet neither character having that love of interference, which makes for much of the unhappiness of the world, each was content to live and let live without inflicting his conscience upon the other or combating his ideals of life. Behind the house a clear mill-stream ran, which, further on, turned two great wheels before it fell back into the river from whence it came. Behind the river a wood stretched into the purple distance; around the house fields of wheat and barley flourished. The brothers from their great farm lands drew a small competence, which they had no desire to spend, loving better to wander apart into the solitude when the day's work was done, than to go among their fellows: one to make with clever hands little models of the inventions his brain was always suggesting,—models he dreamt of patenting in the future, that future which is always the dreamer's, and which is too far off for life; the other to scribble verses and songs that no one ever saw, and which even his brother only suspected he wrote.