It was a dim light--that of the candles--but even to-day it shines through the long alley of these many years upon my pathway.

I see now what I saw not then in the candle-light, a race marching out of darkness, ignorance and poverty with our little party in the caravan.

Crowding on, they widened the narrow way of their stern religion.
At first we had only _The Horse Farrier, The Cattle Book, The Story of the Indian Wars_--a book which had been presented to Aunt Deel by her grandmother, and which in its shroud of white linen lay buried in her trunk most of the time for fear harm would come to it, as it did, indeed, when in a moment of generosity she had loaned it to me.

The Bible and the _St.Lawrence Republican_ were always with us.
Many a night, when a speech of Daniel Webster or Henry Clay or Dewitt Clinton had pushed me to the edge of unconsciousness, while I resisted by counting the steel links in the watch chain of Uncle Peabody--my rosary in every time of trouble--I had been bowled over the brink by some account of horse colic and its remedy, or of the proper treatment of hoof disease in sheep.

I suffered keenly from the horse colic and like troubles and from the many hopes and perils of democracy in my childhood.