Old Ephraim lacked the cunning for that kind of success. He was lame
and slow, tending toward stoutness, and having a film over one eye;
and Samuel knew that the boarders made fun of him, even while they
devoured his food and took advantage of him. This was the first
bitterness of Samuel's life; for he knew that within old Ephraim's
bosom was the heart of a king. Once the boy had heard him in the room
beneath his attic, talking with one of the boarders, a widow with a
little daughter of whom the old man was fond. "I've had a feeling,
ma'am," he was saying, "that somehow you might be in trouble. And I
wanted to say that if you can't spare this money, I would rather you
kept it; for I don't need it now, and you can send it to me when
things are better with you." That was Ephraim Prescott's way with his
boarders; and so he did not grow in riches as fast as he grew in soul.
Ephraim's wife had taught him to read the Bible. He read it every
night, and on Sundays also; and if what he was reading was sublime
poetry, and a part of the world's best literature, the old man did not
know it. He took it all as having actual relationship to such matters
as trading horses and feeding boarders. And he taught Samuel to take
it that way also; and as the boy grew up there took root within him a
great dismay and perplexity, that these moral truths which he read in
the Book seemed to count for so little in the world about him.
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