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No matter how humble your calling in life may be, take heart from the fact that many of the world's greatest men have had no superior advantages. Lincoln studied law lying on his face before a log-fire; General Garfield drove a mule on a canal tow-path in his boyhood, and George Peabody, owing to the poverty of his family, was an errand boy in a grocery store at the age of eleven.
There were fresh-faced girls, and sweet, freckled-faced girls, and jolly girls, and shy girls all sorts of girls except sulky, "toney" girls and lanky chaps, most of them sawney, and weird, whiskered agriculturists, who watched the dancers with old, old time-worn smiles, or stood, or sat on their heels yarning, with their pipes, outside, where two boilers were slung over a log-fire to boil water for tea; and there were leathery women, with complexions like dried apples, who gossiped for the first time in months perhaps and watched the young people, and thought at times, no doubt, of other days of other days when they were girls.
It was cosy in the drawing-room when the family collected and made a circle round the log-fire. By unanimous vote Diana's story was given first innings, and, seated in a basket-chair near the lamp, she opened her manuscript. "I thought I'd rather read it than tell it, if you don't mind," she said. "I'm a duffer sometimes at telling things.
"There must be a table for the Log-Fire Room," Jean told her husband, "and a fire-bench, not too high, and a big chair for you, and another chair for me " "And a stool for your little feet ." "And a desk for you, Derry." "And an oval mirror with a gold frame, for me to see your face in, Jean-Joan "
In a few minutes, Chad was inside the big log cabin and before a big log-fire, with Jack between his knees and turning his soft human eyes keenly from one to another of the group about his little master, telling how the mountain cholera had carried off the man and the woman who had been father and mother to him, and their children; at which the old mother nodded her head in growing sympathy, for there were two fresh mounds in her own graveyard on the point of a low hill not far away; how old Nathan Cherry, whom he hated, had wanted to bind him out, and how, rather than have Jack mistreated and himself be ill-used, he had run away along the mountain-top; how he had slept one night under a log with Jack to keep him warm; how he had eaten sassafras and birch back and had gotten drink from the green water-bulbs of the wild honeysuckle; and how, on the second day, being hungry, and without powder for his gun, he had started, when the sun sank, for the shadows of the valley at the mouth of Kingdom Come.
During the middle of December there were some days of such intense cold that even our young Crusoes, hardy as they were, preferred the blazing log-fire and warm ingle-nook to the frozen lake and cutting north-west wind which blew the loose snow in blinding drifts over its bleak, unsheltered surface.
There was a charming log-fire on the hearth, sparkling and crackling; whirr, whirr, whirr, went the old woman's wheel, and there she sate in her chair just as usual; and the wind was blowing, and the rain was pelting against the shutters, exactly as it did the very night puss had left the cottage in such a mysterious way. In fact, everything looked precisely the same.
Between the green tendrils one got a glimpse of the picture within the dresser with its wealth of shining crockery, the log-fire leaping merrily on the hearth, a little brown teapot winking in the glow, the table spread with a clean white cloth and set out for two. It made a pretty picture, yet, as has been said, Mrs.
The room below was still half lighted by the flickering log-fire, and Helen's shadow loomed up on the opposite wall as she rushed across the room and opened the door. The gray light of dawn was just spreading across the lake, but the girl noticed only one thing, her husband's swiftly moving figure.
And then there were wonderful tales of marvellous feats and hair-breadth escapes to listen to, as they sat with eager looks and open ears round the blazing log-fire in the old log-house. Now they would in their turns have tales to tell of strange adventures, and all that had befallen them since the first day of their wanderings on the Rice Lake Plains.
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