He unearthed the candle, lit it, and
clearing away a part of the shavings stood it up on the floor. He then
brought a prized, battered, and coverless volume from a hidden recess in
the rafters, and lying down with the buffalo robe over him, and his cap
in his hand ready to extinguish the light at the first footstep of a
trespasser, gave himself up--as he had given himself up, I fear, many
other times--to the enchantment of the page before him.
The current whispered, murmured, and sang, unheeded at his side. The
voices of his mother and sisters, raised at times in eagerness or
expectation of the future, fell upon his unlistening ears. For with the
spell that had come upon him, the mean walls of his hiding-place
melted away; the vulgar stream beside him might have been that dim,
subterraneous river down which Sindbad and his bale of riches were swept
out of the Cave of Death to the sunlight of life and fortune, so surely
and so simply had it transported him beyond the cramped and darkened
limits of his present life. He was in the better world of boyish
romance,--of gallant deeds and high emprises; of miraculous atonement
and devoted sacrifice; of brave men, and those rarer, impossible
women,--the immaculate conception of a boy's virgin heart. What mattered
it that behind that glittering window his mother and sisters grew
feverish and excited over the vulgar details of their real but baser
fortune? From the dark tool-shed by the muddy current, John Milton,
with a battered dogs'-eared chronicle, soared on the wings of fancy far
beyond their wildest ken!
CHAPER V.
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