irection, east or west.

"My son requires the most unremitting parental discipline and control,"
Mr. Thorpe remarked, in explanation of his motives for forcing Zack to
adopt a commercial career. "When he is not under my own eye at home, he
must be under the eyes of devout friends, in whom I can place unlimited
confidence. One of these devout friends is ready to receive him into
his counting-house; to keep him industriously occupied from nine in
the morning till six in the evening; to surround him with estimable
examples; and, in short, to share with me the solemn responsibility of
managing his moral and religious training. Persons who ask me to allow
motives of this awfully important nature to be modified in the
smallest degree by any considerations connected with the lad's natural
disposition (which has been a source of grief to me from his childhood)
with his bodily gifts of the flesh (which have hitherto only served to
keep him from the cultivation of the gifts of the spirit); or with his
own desires (which I know by bitter experience to be all of the world,
worldly);--persons, I say, who ask me to do any of these things, ask me
also to act from a godless principle of expediency, and to violate moral
rectitude by impiously compounding with vice."

Acting on such principles of parental discipline as these, Mr. Thorpe
conscientiously believed that he had done his duty, when he had at last
forced his son into the merchant's office. He had, in truth, perpetrated
one of the most serious mistakes which it is possible for a wrong-headed
father to commit. For once, Zack had not exaggerated in saying that his
aversion to employment in a counting-house amounted to absolute horror.
His physical peculiarities, and the habits which they had entailed on
him from boyhood, made life in the open air, and the constant use of his
hardy thews and sinews a constitutional necessity. He felt--and there
was no self-delusion in the feeling--that he should mope and pine, like
a wild animal in a cage, under confinement in an office, only varied
from morning to evening by commercial walking expeditions of a miserable
mile or two in close and crowded streets. These forebodings--to say
nothing of his natural yearning towards adventure, change of scene, and
exhilarating bodily exertion--would have been sufficient of themselves
to have decided him to leave his home, and battle his way through the
world (he cared not where or how, so long as he batt