University of Virginia Library

7. CHAPTER VII.
I LEAVE THE BIRD'S NEST AND MAKE A GREAT DISCOVERY.

Life is remembered rather by epochs than by continuous details.
I spent five years at The Bird's Nest, visiting home twice
every year, and becoming more and more accustomed to the
thought that I had practically ceased to be a member of my
own family. My home and all my belongings were at the Mansion;
and although I kept a deep, warm spot in my heart for
my father, which never grew cold, there seemed to be a difference
in kind and quality between me and my brothers and sisters
which forbade the old intimacy. The life at home had
grown more generous with my father's advancing prosperity,
and my sister, catching the spirit of the prosperous community
around them, had done much to beautify and elevate its appointments.

The natural tendency of the treatment I received, both at
my father's house and at The Mansion, was for a long time to
concentrate my thoughts upon myself, so that when, on my
fifteenth birthday, I entered my father's door, and felt peculiarly
charmed by my welcome and glad in the happiness which
my presence gave, I made a discovery. I found my sister
Claire a remarkably pretty young woman. She was two years
my senior, and had been so long my profoundest worshipper
that I had never dreamed what she might become. She was
the sweetest of blondes, with that unerring instinct of dress
which enabled her to choose always the right color, and so to
drape her slender and graceful figure as to be always attractive.
My own advance toward manhood helped me, I suppose, to
appreciate her as I had not hitherto done; and before I parted
with her, to return to the closing term of Mr. Bird's tuition, I

had become proud of her, and ambitious for her future. I
found, too, that she had more than kept pace with me in study.
It was a great surprise. By what ingenuities she had managed
to win her accomplishments, and become the educated lady that
she was, I knew not. It was the way of New England girls
then as it is now. I had long talks and walks with her, and
quite excited the jealousy of Mrs. Sanderson by the amount of
time I devoted to her.

In these years Mrs. Sanderson herself had hardly grown appreciably
older. Her hair had become a little whiter, but she
retained, apparently, all her old vigor, and was the same strong-willed,
precise, prompt, opinionated woman she was when I
first knew her. Jenks and I had many sails upon the atlas succeeding
that which I have described, but something had always
interfered to prevent him from taking the final step which would
sever his connection with the service of his old mistress forever.

Every time during these five years that I went home to spend
my vacation, I invited Henry to accompany me, but his mother
invariably refused to permit him to do so. Mrs. Sanderson, in
her disappointment, offered to defray all the expenses of the
journey, which, in the mean time, had ceased to be made with
the old horse and chaise; but there came always from his mother
the same refusal. The old lady was piqued at last, and became
soured toward him. Indeed, if she could have found a valid
excuse for the step, she would have broken off our intimacy.
She had intended an honor to an unknown lad in humble circumstances;
and to have that honor persistently spurned, without
apparent reason, exasperated her. “The lad is a churl,
depend upon it, when you get at the bottom of him,” was the
stereotyped reply to all my attempts to palliate his offence, and
vindicate the lovableness of his character.

These years of study and development had wrought great
changes in me. Though thoroughly healthy—thanks to the
considerate management of my teacher—I grew up tall and
slender, and promised to reach the reputed altitude of the old

Bonnicastles. I was a man in stature by the side of my sister
Claire, and assumed the dress and carriage of a man. Though
Henry was two years older than I, we studied together in everything,
and were to leave school together. Our companionship
had been fruitful of good to both of us. I stirred him and he
steadied me.

There was one aim which we held in common—the aim at
personal integrity and thorough soundness of character. This
aim had been planted in us both by Christian parents, and it
was fostered in every practicable way by Mr. and Mrs. Bird.
There was one habit, learned at home, which we never omitted
for a night while we were at school—the habit of kneeling at
our bedside before retiring to slumber, and offering silently a
prayer. Dear Mrs. Bird—that sweet angel of all the little boys
—was always with us in our first nights together, when we engaged
in our devotions, and sealed our young lips for sleep with
a kiss. Bidding us to pray for what we wanted, and to thank
our Father for all that we received, with the simple and hearty
language we would use if we were addressing our own parents,
and adjuring us never, under any circumstances, to omit our
offering, she left us at last to ourselves. “Remember,” she used
to say, “remember that no one can do this for you. The boy
who confesses his sins every night has always the fewest sins
to confess. The habit of daily confession and prayer is the
surest corrective of all that is wrong in your motives and conduct.”

In looking back upon this aspect of our life together, I am
compelled to believe that both Henry and myself were in the
line of Christian experience. Those prayers and those daily
efforts at good, conscientious living, were the solid beginnings
of a Christian character. I do not permit myself to question
that had I gone on in that simple way I should have grown into
a Christian man. The germination and development of the
seed planted far back in childhood would, I am sure, have been
crowned with a divine fruitage. Both of us had been taught
that we belonged to the Master—that we had been given to

Him in baptism. Neither of us had been devoted to Him by
parents who, having placed His seal upon our foreheads, thenceforth
strove to convince us that we were the children of the
devil. Expecting to be Christians, trying to live according to
the Christian rule of life, never doubting that in good time we
should be numbered among Christian disciples, we were already
Christian disciples. Why should it be necessary that the aggregate
sorrow and remorse for years of selfishness and transgression
be crowded into a few hours or days? Why should it be
necessary to be lifted out of a great horror of blackness and
darkness and tempest, into a supernal light by one grand sweep
of passion? Are safe foundations laid in storms and upheavals?
Are conviction and character nourished by violent access and
reaction of feeling? We give harsh remedies for desperate diseases,
and there are such things as desperate diseases. I am
sure that Henry and I were not desperately diseased. The
whole drift of our aims was toward the realization of a Christian
life. The grand influences shaping us from childhood
were Christian. Every struggle with that which was base and
unworthy within us was inspired by Christian motives. Imperfect
in knowledge, infirm in will, volatile in purpose as boys
always are and always will be, still we were Christian boys, who
had only to grow in order to rise into the purer light and better
life of the Christian estate.

I am thus particular in speaking of this, for I was destined
to pass through an experience which endangered all
that I had won. I shall write of this experience with great
care, but with a firm conviction that my unvarnished story
has a useful lesson in it, and an earnest wish that it may advance
the cause which holds within itself the secret of a world's redemption.
I am sure that our religious teachers do not competently
estimate the power of religious education on a great
multitude of minds, or adequately measure the almost infinite
mischief that may be inflicted upon sensitive natures by methods
of address and influence only adapted to those who are sluggish
in temperament or besotted by vice.

My long stay at The Bird's Nest was a period of uninterrupted
growth of mind as well as of body. Mr. Bird was a man who
recognized the fact that time is one of the elements that enter
into a healthy development of the mind—that mental digestion
and assimilation are quite as essential to true growth as the reception
of abundant food. Hence his aim was never to crowd
a pupil beyond his powers of easy digestion, and never to press
to engorgement the receptive faculties. To give the mind ideas
to live upon while it acquired the discipline for work, was his
steady practice and policy. All the current social and political
questions were made as familiar to the boys under his charge as
they were to the reading world outside. The issues involved
in every political contest were explained to us, and I think we
learned more that was of practical use to us in after-life from
his tongue than from the text-books which we studied.

Some of the peculiarities of Mr. Bird's administration I have
already endeavored to represent, and one of these I must recall
at the risk of repetition and tediousness. In the five years which
I spent under his roof and care, I do not think one lad left the
school with the feeling that he had been unjustly treated in any
instance. No bitter revenges were cherished in any heart. If,
in his haste or perplexity, the master ever did a boy a wrong,
he made instant and abundant reparation, in an acknowledgment
to the whole school. He was as tender of the humblest
boy's reputation as he was of any man's, or even of his own.
When I think of the brutal despotism that reigns in so many
schools of this and other countries, and of the indecent way in
which thousands of sensitive young natures are tortured by men
who, in the sacred office of the teacher, display manners that
have ceased to be respectable in a stable, I bless my kind stars
—nay, I thank God—for those five years, and the sweet influence
that has poured from them in a steady stream through all
my life.

The third summer of my school life was “Reunion Summer,”
and one week of vacation was devoted to the old boys. It
was with inexpressible interest that I witnessed the interviews

between them and their teacher. Young men from college
with downy whiskers and fashionable clothes; young men in
business, with the air of business in their manners; young
clergymen, doctors, and lawyers came back by scores. They
brought a great breeze from the world with them, but all became
boys again when they entered the presence of their old
master. They kissed him as they were wont to do in the times
which had become old times to them. They hung upon his
neck; they walked up and down the parlors with their arms
around him; they sat in his lap, and told him of their changes,
troubles and successes; and all were happy to be at the old nest
again.

Ah, what fêtes were crowded into that happy week!—what
games of ball, what receptions, what excursions, what meetings
and speeches, what songs, what delightful interminglings of all
the social elements of the village! What did it matter that we
small boys felt very small by the side of those young men whose
old rooms we were occupying? We enjoyed their presence,
and found in it the promise that at some future time we should
come back with whiskers upon our cheeks, and the last triumphs
of the tailor in our coats!

Henry and I were to leave school in the autumn; and as the
time drew near for our departure dear Mr. and Mrs. Bird grew
more tender toward us, for we had been there longer than any
of the other boys. I think there was not a lad at The Bird's
Nest during our last term whom we found there on our entrance
five years before. Jolly Jack Linton had become a clerk in a
city shop, and was already thrifty and popular. Tom Kendrick
was in college, and was to become a Christian minister. Andrews,
too, was in college, and was bringing great comfort to
his family by a true life that had been begun with so bad a
promise. Mr. Bird seemed to take a special pleasure in our society,
and, while loosening his claim upon us as pupils, to hold us
as associates and friends the more closely. He loved his boys as
a father loves his children. In one of our closing interviews, he
and Mrs. Bird talked freely of the life they had lived, and its

beautiful compensations. They never wearied with their work,
but found in the atmosphere of love that enveloped them an inspiration
for all their labor and care, and a balm for all their trials
and troubles. “If I were to live my life over again,” said Mrs.
Bird to me one evening, “I should choose just this, and be perfectly
content.” There are those teachers who have thought
and said that “every boy is a born devil,” and have taught for
years because they were obliged to teach, with a thorough
and outspoken detestation of their work. It is sad to think
that multitudes of boys have been trained and misunderstood and
abused by these men, and to know that thousands of them are
still in office, untrusted and unloved by the tender spirits which
they have in charge.

My connection with Mrs. Sanderson was a subject to which
Mr. Bird very rarely alluded. I was sure there was something
about it which he did not like, and in the last private conversation
which I held with him it all came out.

“I want to tell you, Arthur,” he said, “that I have but one
fear for you. You have already been greatly injured by Mrs.
Sanderson, and by the peculiar relations which she holds to
your life. In some respects you are not as lovable as when
you first came here. You have become exclusive in your society,
obtrusive in your dress, and fastidious in your notions of
many things. You are under the spell of a despotic will, and
the moulding power of sentiments entirely foreign to your nature.
She has not spoiled you, but she has injured you. You
have lost your liberty, and a cunning hand is endeavoring to
shape you to a destiny which it has provided for you. Now no
wealth can compensate you for such a change. If she make
you her heir, as I think she intends to do, she calculates upon
your becoming a useless and selfish gentleman after a pattern
of her own. Against this transformation you must struggle.
To lose your sympathy for your own family and for the great
multitude of the poor; to limit your labor to the nursing of an
old and large estate; to surrender all your plans for an active
life of usefulness among men, is to yield yourself to a fate worse

than any poverty can inflict. It is to be bought, to be paid for,
and to be made a slave of. I can never be reconciled to any
such consummation of your life.”

This was plain talk, but it was such as he had a right to indulge
in; and I knew and felt it to be true. I had arrived at
the conviction in my own way before, and I had wished in my
heart of hearts that I had had my own fortune to make, like
the other boys with whom I had associated. I knew that
Henry's winter was to be devoted to teaching, in order to provide
himself with a portion of the funds which would be necessary
for the further pursuit of his education. He had been
kept back by poverty from entering school at first, so that he
was no further advanced in study than myself, though the years
had given him wider culture and firmer character than I possessed.
Still, I felt entirely unable and unwilling to relinquish
advantages which brought me immunity from anxiety and care,
and the position which those advantages and my prospects
gave me. My best ambitions were already sapped. I had become
weak and to a sad extent self-indulgent. I had acquired
no vices, but my beautiful room at The Mansion had been
made still more beautiful with expensive appointments, my
wardrobe was much enlarged, and, in short, I was in love with
riches and all that riches procured for me.

Mr. Bird's counsel produced a deep impression upon me,
and made me more watchful of the changes in my character
and the processes by which they were wrought. In truth, I
strove against them, in a weak way, as a slave might strive
with chains of gold, which charm him and excite his cupidity
while they bind him.

Here, perhaps, I ought to mention the fact that there was
one subject which Henry would never permit me to talk about,
viz., the relations with Mrs. Sanderson upon whose baleful
power over me Mr. Bird had animadverted so severely. Why
these and my allusions to them were so distasteful to him. I did
not know, and could not imagine, unless it were that he did
not like to realize the difference between his harder lot and

mine. “Please never mention the name of Mrs. Sanderson to
me again,” he said to me one day, almost ill-naturedly, and
quite peremptorily. “I am tired of the old woman, and I
should think you would be.”

Quite unexpectedly, toward the close of the term, I received
a letter from my father, conveying a hearty invitation to Henry
to accompany me to Bradford, and become a guest in his house.
With the fear of Mrs. Sanderson's displeasure before my eyes,
should he accept an invitation from my father which he had
once and many times again declined when extended by herself,
I was mean enough to consider the purpose of withholding it
from him altogether. But I wanted him in Bradford. I wanted
to show him to my friends, and so, risking all untoward consequences,
I read him the invitation.

Henry's face brightened in an instant, and, without consulting
his mother, he said at once: “I shall go.”

Very much surprised, and fearful of what would come of it,
I blundered out some faint expression of my pleasure at the
prospect of his continued society, and the matter was settled.

I cannot recall our parting with Mr. and Mrs. Bird without
a blinding suffusion of the eyes. Few words were said. “You
know it all, my boy,” said Mr. Bird, as he put his arms around
me, and pressed me to his side. “I took you into my heart
when I first saw you, and you will live there until you prove
yourself unworthy of the place.”

For several years a lumbering old stage-coach with two
horses had run between Hillsborough and Bradford, and to
this vehicle Henry and I committed our luggage and ourselves.
It was a tedious journey, which terminated at nightfall, and
brought us first to my father's house. Ordering my trunks
to be carried to The Mansion, I went in to introduce Henry
to the family, with the purpose of completing my own journey
on foot.

Henry was evidently a surprise to them all. Manly in size,
mould and bearing, he bore no resemblance to the person
whom they had been accustomed to regard as a lad. There

[ILLUSTRATION]

Claire's hand lighted the candle with which I led him to his room.

[Description: 587EAF. Illustration page. Image of two young men and a woman by a lit fireplace. One young man sits in a chair with his chin in his hand, and the other stands behind him. The woman is lighting a piece of tinder from the fire, and she is holding a candle in her other hand.]

was embarrassment at first, which Henry's quiet and unpretending
manners quickly dissipated; and soon the stream of
easy conversation was set flowing, and we were all happy together.
I quickly saw that my sister Claire had become the
real mistress of the household. The evidences of her care were
everywhere. My mother was feeble and prone to melancholy;
but her young spirit, full of vitality, had asserted its sway, and
produced a new atmosphere in the little establishment. Order,
taste, and a look of competency and comfort prevailed. Without
any particular motive, I watched the interchange of address
and impression between Henry and my sister. It was as
charming as a play. Two beings brought together from different
worlds could not have appeared more interested in each
other. Her cheeks were flushed, her blue eyes were luminous,
her words were fresh and vivacious, and with a woman's quick
instinct she felt that she pleased him. Absorbed in his study
of the new nature thus opened to him, Henry so far forgot
the remainder of the family as to address all his words to her.
If my father asked him a question, he answered it to Claire.
If he told a story, or related an incident of our journey homeward,
he addressed it to her, as if her ears were the only ones
that could hear it, or at least were those which would hear it
with the most interest. I cannot say that I had not anticipated
something like this. I had wondered, at least, how they would
like each other. Claire's hand lighted the candle with which I
led him to his room. Claire's hand had arranged the little
bouquet which we found upon his table.

“I shall like all your father's family very much, I know,”
said Henry, in our privacy.

I was quick enough to know who constituted the largest
portion of the family, in his estimate of the aggregate.

It was with a feeling of positive unhappiness and humiliation
that I at last took leave of the delightful and delighted
circle, and bent my steps to my statelier lodgings and the
society of my cold and questioning Aunt. I knew that there
would be no hope of hiding from her the fact that Henry had

accompanied me home, and that entire frankness and promptness
in announcing it was my best policy; but I dreaded the
impression it would make upon her. I found her awaiting my
arrival, and met from her a hearty greeting. How I wished
that Henry were a hundred miles away!

“I left my old chum at my father's,” I said, almost before
she had time to ask me a question.

“You did!” she exclaimed, her dark eyes flaming with anger.
“How came he there?”

“My father invited him and he came home with me,” I replied.

“So he spurns your invitation and mine, and accepts your
father's. Will you explain this?”

“Indeed I cannot,” I replied. “I have nothing to say, except
that I am sorry and ashamed.”

“I should think so! I should think so!” she exclaimed, rising
and walking up and down the little library. “I should
think so, indeed! One thing is proved, at least, and proved to
your satisfaction, I hope—that he is not a gentleman. I really
must forbid”—here she checked herself, and reconsidered.
She saw that I did not follow her with my sympathy, and
thought best to adopt other methods for undermining my friendship
for him.

“Arthur,” she said, at last, seating herself and controlling
her rage, “your model friend has insulted both of us. I am an
old woman, and he is nothing to me. He has been invited
here solely on your account, and, if he is fond of you, he has
declined the invitation solely on mine. There is a certain
chivalry—a sense of what is due to any woman under these
circumstances—that you understand as well as I do, and I
shall leave you to accept or reject its dictates. I ask nothing
of you that is based in any way on my relations to you. This
fellow has grossly, and without any apology or explanation,
slighted my courtesies, and crowned his insult by accepting
those coming from a humbler source—from one of my own tenants,
in fact.”

“I have nothing to say,” I responded. “I am really not to
blame for his conduct, but I should be ashamed to quarrel with
anybody because he would not do what I wanted him to do.”

“Very well. If that is your conclusion, I must ask you never
to mention his name to me again, and if you hold any communication
with him, never to tell me of it. You disappoint me,
but you are young, and you must be bitten yourself before you
will learn to let dogs alone.”

I had come out of the business quite as well as I expected
to, but it was her way of working. She saw that I loved my
companion with a firmness that she could not shake, and that
it really was not in me to quarrel with him. She must wait for
favoring time and circumstances, and resort to other arts to
accomplish her ends—arts of which she was the conscious mistress.
She had not forbidden me to see him and hold intercourse
with him. She knew, indeed, that I must see him, and
that I could not quarrel with him without offending my father,
whose guest he was—a contingency to be carefully avoided.

I knew, however, that all practical means would be used to
keep me out of his company during his stay in Bradford, and I
was not surprised to be met the next morning with a face cleared
from all traces of anger and sullenness, and with projects for
the occupation of my time.

“I am getting to be an old woman, Arthur,” said she, after
a cheery breakfast, “and need help in my affairs, which you
ought to be capable of giving me now.”

I assured her most sincerely that nothing would give me
greater pleasure than to make what return I could for the kindness
she had shown me.

Accordingly, she brought out her accounts, and as she laid
down her books, and package after package of papers, she
said: “I am going to let you into some of my secrets. All
that you see here, and learn of my affairs, is to be entirely confidential.
I shall show you more than my lawyer knows, and
more than anybody knows beyond myself.”

Then she opened an account book, and in a neat hand made

out a bill for rent to one of her tenants. This was the form
she wished me to follow in making out twenty-five or thirty
other bills which she pointed out to me. As I did the work
with much painstaking, the task gave me employment during
the whole of the morning. At its close, we went over it together,
and she was warm in her praises of my handwriting and
the correctness of my transcript.

After dinner she told me she would like to have me look over
some of the papers which she had left on the table. “It is possible,”
she said, “that you may find something that will interest
you. I insist only on two conditions: you are to keep secret
everything you learn, and ask me no question about what may
most excite your curiosity.”

One ponderous bundle of papers I found to be composed
entirely of bonds and mortgages. It seemed as if she had her
hold upon nearly every desirable piece of property in the town.
By giving me a view of this and showing me her rent-roll, she
undoubtedly intended to exhibit her wealth, which was certainly
very much greater than I had suspected. “All this if you continue
to please me,” was what the exhibition meant; and, young
as I was, I knew what it meant. To hold these pledges of real
estate, and to own this rent-roll was to hold power; and with
that precious package in my hands there came to me my first
ambition for power, and a recognition of that thirst to gratify
which so many men had bartered their honor and their souls.
In that book and in those papers lay the basis of the old lady's
self-assurance. It was to these that men bowed with deferential
respect or superfluous fawning. It was to these that fine
ladies paid their devoirs; and a vision of the future showed all
these demonstrations of homage transferred to me—a young
man—with life all before me. The prospect held not only
these but a thousand delights—travel in foreign lands, horses
and household pets, fine equipage, pictures, brilliant society, and
some sweet, unknown angel in the form of a woman, to be loved
and petted and draped with costly fabrics and fed upon dainties.

I floated off into a wild, intoxicating dream. All the possibilities

of my future came before me. In my imagination I
already stood behind that great bulwark against a thousand ills
of life which money builds, and felt myself above the petty
needs that harass the toiling multitude. I was already a social
center and a king. Yet after all, when the first excitement
was over, and I realized the condition that lay between me and
the realization of my dreams—“all this if you continue to
please me”—I knew and felt that I was a slave. I was not
my own: I had been purchased. I could not freely follow
even the impulses of my own natural affection.

Tiring of the package at last, and of the thoughts and
emotions it excited, I turned to others. One after another I
took them up and partly examined them, but they were mostly
dead documents—old policies of insurance long since expired,
old contracts for the erection of buildings that had themselves
grown old, mortgages that had been canceled, old abstracts of
title, etc., etc. At last I found, at the bottom of the pile, a
package yellow with age; and I gasped with astonishment as I
read on the back of the first paper: “James Mansfield to Peter
Bonnicastle.” I drew it quickly from the tape, and saw exposed
upon the next paper: “Julius Wheeler to Peter Bonnicastle.”
Thus the name went on down through the whole
package. All the papers were old, and all of them were deeds
—some of them conveying thousands of acres of colonial
lands. Thus I learned two things that filled me with such delight
and pride as I should find it altogether impossible to
describe; first, that the fortune which I had been examining,
and which I had a tolerable prospect of inheriting, had its
foundations laid a century before by one of my own ancestors;
and second, that Mrs. Sanderson and I had common blood in
our veins. This discovery quite restored my self-respect,
because I should arrive at my inheritance by at least a show
of right. The property would remain in the family where it
belonged, and, so far as I knew, no member of the family
would have a better right to it than myself. I presumed that
my father was a descendant of this same Peter Bonnicastle,

who was doubtless a notable man in his time; and only the
accidents of fortune had diverted this large wealth from my
own branch of the family.

This discovery brought up to my memory the conversations
that had taken place in my home on my first arrival in the
town, between Mr. Bradford and my father. Here was where
the “blue blood” came from, and Mr. Bradford had known
about this all the time. It was his hint to Mrs. Sanderson
that had procured for me my good fortune. My first impulse
was to thank him for his service, and to tell him that I probably
knew as much as he did of my relations to Mrs. Sanderson; but
the seal of secrecy was upon my lips. I recalled to mind Mrs.
Sanderson's astonishment and strange behavior when she first
heard my father's name, and thus all the riddles of that first
interview were solved.

Pride of wealth and power had now firmly united itself in my
mind with pride of ancestry; and though there were humiliating
considerations connected with my relations to Mrs.
Sanderson, my self-respect had been wonderfully strengthened,
and I found that my heart was going out to the little old lady
with a new sentiment—a sentiment of kinship, if not of love.
I identified myself with her more perfectly than I had hitherto
done. She had placed confidence in me, she had praised my
work, and she was a Bonnicastle.

I have often looked back upon the revelations and the
history of that day, and wondered whether it was possible that
she had foreseen all the processes of mind through which I
passed, and intelligently and deliberately contrived to procure
them. She must have done so. There was not an instrument
wanting for the production of the result she desired, and there
was nothing wanting in the result.

The afternoon passed, and I neither went home nor felt a
desire to do so. In the evening she invited me to read, and
thus I spent a pleasant hour preparatory to an early bed.

“You have been a real comfort to me to-day, Arthur,” she
said, as I kissed her forehead and bade her good-night.

What more could a lad who loved praise ask than this? I
went to sleep entirely happy, and with a new determination to
devote myself more heartily to the will and the interests of my
benefactress. It ceased to be a great matter that my companion
for five years was in my father's home, and I saw little
of him. I was employed with writing and with business
errands all the time. During Henry's visit in Bradford I was in
and out of my father's house, as convenience favored, and always
while on an errand that waited. I think Henry appreciated
the condition of affairs, and as he and Claire were on charming
terms, and my absence gave him more time with her, I presume
that he did not miss me. All were glad to see me useful, and
happy in my usefulness.

When Henry went away I walked down to bid him farewell.
“Now don't cry, my boy,” said Henry, “for I am coming
back; and don't be excited when I tell you that I have
engaged to spend the winter in Bradford. I was wondering
where I could find a school to teach, and the school has come
to me, examining committee and all.”

I was delighted. I looked at Claire with the unguarded impulse
of a boy, and it brought the blood into her cheeks painfully.
Henry parted with her very quietly—indeed, with
studied quietness—but was warm in his thanks to my father
and mother for their hospitality, and hearty with the boys, with
whom he had become a great favorite.

I saw that Henry was happy, and particularly happy in the
thought of returning. As the stage-coach rattled away, he
kissed his hand to us all, and shouted “Au revoir!” as if his
anticipations of pleasure were embraced in those words rather
than in the fact that he was homeward-bound.