No tyrant’s fetter binds the soul,
  The mind of man’s above control;
  Necessity, that makes the slave,
  Has taught the free a course more brave;
  With bold, determined heart to dare
  The ills that all are born to share.

  Believe me, youth, the truly great
  Stoop not to mourn o’er fallen state;
  They make their wants and wishes less,
  And rise superior to distress;
  The glebe they break—­the sheaf they bind—­
  But elevates a noble mind.

  Contented in my rugged cot,
  Your lordly towers I envy not;
  Though rude our clime and coarse our cheer,
  True independence greets you here;
  Amid these forests, dark and wild,
  Dwells honest labour’s hardy child.

  His happy lot I gladly share,
  And breathe a purer, freer air;
  No more by wealthy upstart spurn’d,
  The bread is sweet by labour earn’d;
  Indulgent heaven has bless’d the soil,
  And plenty crowns the woodman’s toil.

  Beneath his axe, the forest yields
  Its thorny maze to fertile fields;
  This goodly breadth of well-till’d land,
  Well-purchased by his own right hand,
  With conscience clear, he can bequeath
  His children, when he sleeps in death.

CHAPTER VII

UNCLE JOE AND HIS FAMILY

“Ay, your rogue is a laughing rogue, and not a whit the less dangerous for the smile on his lip, which comes not from an honest heart, which reflects the light of the soul through the eye.  All is hollow and dark within; and the contortion of the lip, like the phosophoric glow upon decayed timber, only serves to point out the rotteness within.”

Uncle Joe!  I see him now before me, with his jolly red face, twinkling black eyes, and rubicund nose.  No thin, weasel-faced Yankee was he, looking as if he had lived upon ’cute ideas and speculations all his life; yet Yankee he was by birth, ay, and in mind, too; for a more knowing fellow at a bargain never crossed the lakes to abuse British institutions and locate himself comfortably among despised Britishers.  But, then, he had such a good-natured, fat face, such a mischievous, mirth-loving smile, and such a merry, roguish expression in those small, jet-black, glittering eyes, that you suffered yourself to be taken in by him, without offering the least resistance to his impositions.

Uncle Joe’s father had been a New England loyalist, and his doubtful attachment to the British government had been repaid by a grant of land in the township of H—–.  He was the first settler in that township, and chose his location in a remote spot, for the sake of a beautiful natural spring, which bubbled up in a small stone basin in the green bank at the back of the house.

“Father might have had the pick of the township,” quoth Uncle Joe; “but the old coon preferred that sup of good water to the site of a town.  Well, I guess it’s seldom I trouble the spring; and whenever I step that way to water the horses, I think what a tarnation fool the old one was, to throw away such a chance of making his fortune, for such cold lap.”