his father was somewhat that
seemed to him as awful a sacrilege as to be angry with his God, and yet
he felt that his father had been bitterly, cruelly unjust towards him. He
had driven economy to the most stringent extremes; he had avoided the
intimacy of his class fellows, lest he should be drawn into needless
expenses; he had borne with shabby clothing and mean fare among better
dressed and richer associates, and been willing to bear it. He had
studied faithfully, unremittingly, for two years, but at the moment he
turned from his father the throb that wrung his heart was the giving up
of all. He had in his pocket a letter from his townsman and schoolmate,
Sam Allen, mate of an East Indiaman just fitting out at Salem, and it
said:

"We are going to sail with a picked crew, and we want one just such a
fellow as you for third mate. Come along, and you can go right up, and
your college mathematics will be all the better for us. Come right off,
and your berth will be ready, and away for round the world!"

Here, to be sure, was immediate position--wages--employment--freedom from
the intolerable burden of dependence; but it was accepted at the
sacrifice of all his life's hopes. True, that in those days the
experiment of a sea-faring life had often, even in instances which he
recalled, brought forth fortune and an ability to settle down in peaceful
competence in after life. But there was Diana. Would she wait for him?
Encircled on all sides with lovers, would she keep faith with an
adventurer gone for an indefinite quest? The desponding, self-distrusting
side of his nature said, "No. Why should she?" Then, to go was to give
up Diana--to make up his mind to have her belong to some other. Then
there was his mother. An unutterable reverential pathos always to him
encircled the idea of his mother. Her life to him seemed a hard one. From
the outside, as he viewed it, it was all self-sacrifice and renunciation.
Yet he knew that she had set her heart on an education for him, as much
as it could be set on anything earthly. He was her pride, her hope; and
just now that very thought was full of bitterness. There was no help for
it; he must not let her work herself to death for him; he would make the
household vessel lighter by the throwing himself into the sea, to sink or
swim as might happen; and then, perhaps, he might come back with money to
help them all.

All this was what was surging and boiling in his mind when he came in
f