In due course the wife of the farmer Day was tried for murder, and
pronounced insane. She had before been removed to an asylum: she now
remained there.
CHAPTER V.
SEEN THROUGH BLEAR EYES.
It was foreseen by the elder Simpson that his son would be a great man.
He looked forth over the world and decided on the kind of greatness. The
wide, busy world would not have known itself as seen in the mind of this
gray-haired countryman. The elder Simpson had never set foot off the
edge of his native island. His father before him had tilled the same
fertile acres, looked out upon the same level landscape--red and green,
when it was not white with snow. Neither of them had felt any desire to
see beyond the brink of that horizon; but ambition, quiet and sturdy,
had been in their hearts. The result of it was the bit of money in the
bank, the prosperous farm, and the firm intention of the present farmer
that his son should cut a figure in the world.
This stern man, as he trudged about at his labour, looked upon the
activities of city life with that same inward eye with which the maiden
looks forth upon her future; and as she, with nicety of preference,
selects the sort of lover she will have, so he selected the sort of
greatness which should befall his son. The stuff of this vision was, as
must always be, of such sort as had entered his mind in the course of
his limited experience.
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