Mr. Toothaker has been a careful dentist to the stumps of his farm. It is beautifully stumpless, and slopes verdantly, or varied with yellow harvest, down to the lake and up to the forest primeval. He has preserved a pretty grove of birch and maple as shelter, ornament, partridge-cover, and perpendicular wood-pile. Below his house and barns is the lovely oval of the lake, seen across the fair fields, bright with wheat, or green with pasture. A road, hedged with briskly-aspiring young spruces, runs for a mile northward, making a faint show at attacking the wilderness. A mile’s loneliness is enough for this unsupported pioneer; he runs up a tree, sees nothing but dark woods, thinks of Labrador and the North Pole, and stops.
Next morning, Mr. Toothaker returned from a political meeting below among the towns. It was the Presidential campaign, — stirring days from pines to prairies, stirring days from codfish to cocoa-nuts. Tonguey men were talking from every stump all over the land. Blatant patriots were heard, wherever a flock of compatriots could be persuaded to listen. The man with one speech containing two stories was making the tour of all the villages. The man with two speeches, each with three stories, one of them very broad indeed, was in request for the towns. The oratorical Stentorian man, with inexhaustible rivers of speech and rafts of stories, was in full torrent at mass-meetings. There was no neighborhood that might
