e came and
spent the time talking on quite equal terms with the steersman, one of
the canalers whom he had admired afar in earlier and simpler days. He
found him a very amiable fellow, by no means haughty, who began to tell
him funny stories, and who even let him take the helm for a while. The
rudder-handle was of polished iron, very different from the clumsy
wooden affair of a freight-boat; and the packet made in a single night
the distance which the boy's family had been nearly two days in
travelling when they moved away from the Boy's Town.

He arrived home for breakfast a travelled and experienced person, and
wholly cured of that longing for his former home that had tormented him
before he revisited its scenes. He now fully gave himself up to his new
environment, and looked forward and not backward. I do not mean to say
that he ceased to love the Boy's Town; that he could not do and never
did. But he became more and more aware that the past was gone from him
forever, and that he could not return to it. He did not forget it, but
cherished its memories the more fondly for that reason.

There was no bitterness in it, and no harm that he could not hope would
easily be forgiven him. He had often been foolish, and sometimes he had
been wicked; but he had never been such a little fool or such a little
sinner but he had wished for more sense and more grace. There are some
great fools and great sinners who try to believe in after-life that they
are the manlier men because they have been silly and mischievous boys,
but he has never believed that. He is glad to have had a boyhood fully
rounded out with all a boy's interests and pleasures, and he is glad
that his lines were cast in the Boy's Town; but he knows, or believes he
knows, that whatever is good in him now came from what was good in him
then; and he is sure that the town was delightful chiefly because his
home in it was happy. The town was small and the boys there were hemmed
in by their inexperience and ignorance; but the simple home was large
with vistas that stretched to the ends of the earth, and it was serenely
bright with a father's reason and warm with a mother's love.

THE END.

* * * * *

Transcriber's Notes:

Obvious punctuation errors repaired.

Page 101, "unbotton" changed to "unbutton" (begins to unbutton)

Page 190, "laugher" changed to "laughter" (great a laughter)

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of