[Pioneers and Founders by Charlotte Mary Yonge]@TWC D-Link book
Pioneers and Founders

CHAPTER II
7/19

He could get no bread but by riding ten or fifteen miles to procure it, and if he brought home too much it became mouldy and sour, while, if he brought home a small quantity, he could not go for more if he failed to catch his horse, which was turned out to graze in the woods; so that he was reduced to making little cakes of Indian meal, which he fried in the ashes.

"And then," he says, "I blessed God as if I had been a king." "I have a house and many of the comforts of life to support me," he says with great satisfaction; and the solitude of that house was so precious to him that, however weary he was, he would ride back twenty miles to it at night rather than spend an evening among ungodly men.

By this terrible stinting of what we should deem the necessaries of life, he was actually able, in fifteen months, to devote a hundred pounds to charitable purposes, besides keeping the young man at the University.
So much, however, did he love his solitude, that he counted it as no relief, but an affliction, to have to ride to Stockbridge from time to time to learn the Indian language from Mr.Sergeant, the missionary there stationed.

Something of this must have been morbid feeling, something from the want of energy consequent on the condition of his frame.

For a man in confirmed decline such an entry in a journal as this is no trifle:--"December 20 .-- Rode to Stockbridge.


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