d pathos never remarked before--the
unconscious utterance of a new sense of sorrow, awakened in a soul that
up to this time had never known a grief.

For the letter had fallen on the heads of the Pitkin household like a
thunderbolt. Biah came in to breakfast and gave it to Mrs. Pitkin, saying
that James had handed him that last night, on his way over to take the
midnight stage to Salem, where he was going to sail on the _Eastern Star_
to-day--no doubt he's off to sea by this time. A confused sound of
exclamations went up around the table, while Mrs. Pitkin, pale and calm,
read the letter and then passed it to her husband without a word. The
bright, fixed color in Diana's face had meanwhile been slowly ebbing
away, till, with cheeks and lips pale as ashes, she hastily rose and left
the table and went to her room. A strange, new, terrible pain--a
sensation like being choked or smothered--a rush of mixed emotions--a
fearful sense of some inexorable, unalterable crisis having come of her
girlish folly--overwhelmed her. Again she remembered the deep tones of
his good-by, and how she had only mocked at his emotion. She sat down and
leaned her head on her hands in a tearless, confused sorrow.

Deacon' Pitkin was at first more shocked and overwhelmed than his wife.
His yesterday's talk with James had no such serious purpose. It had been
only the escape-valve for his hypochondriac forebodings of the future,
and nothing was farther from his thoughts than having it bear fruit in
any such decisive movement on the part of his son. In fact, he secretly
was proud of his talents and his scholarship, and had set his heart on
his going through college, and had no more serious purpose in what he
said the day before than the general one of making his son feel the
difficulties and straits he was put to for him. Young men were tempted at
college to be too expensive, he thought, and to forget what it cost their
parents at home. In short, the whole thing had been merely the passing
off of a paroxysm of hypochondria, and he had already begun to be
satisfied that he should raise his interest money that year without
material difficulty. The letter showed him too keenly the depth of the
suffering he had inflicted on his son, and when he had read it he cast a
sort of helpless, questioning look on his wife, and said, after an
interval of silence:

"Well, mother!"

There was something quite pathetic in the appealing look and voice.'

"Well, fath