his present life, but of an immortal destiny,
is in their hands.

On the whole, those who succeed best in the rearing of children are the
tolerant and easy persons who instinctively follow nature and accept
without much inquiry whatever she sends; or that far smaller class, wise
to discern spirits and apt to adopt means to their culture and
development, who can prudently and carefully train every nature
according to its true and characteristic ideal.

Zephaniah Pennel was a shrewd old Yankee, whose instincts taught him
from the first, that the waif that had been so mysteriously washed out
of the gloom of the sea into his family, was of some different class and
lineage from that which might have filled a cradle of his own, and of a
nature which he could not perfectly understand. So he prudently watched
and waited, only using restraint enough to keep the boy anchored in
society, and letting him otherwise grow up in the solitary freedom of
his lonely seafaring life.

The boy was from childhood, although singularly attractive, of a moody,
fitful, unrestful nature,--eager, earnest, but unsteady,--with varying
phases of imprudent frankness and of the most stubborn and unfathomable
secretiveness. He was a creature of unreasoning antipathies and
attractions. As Zephaniah Pennel said of him, he was as full of hitches
as an old bureau drawer. His peculiar beauty, and a certain electrical
power of attraction, seemed to form a constant circle of protection and
forgiveness around him in the home of his foster-parents; and great as
was the anxiety and pain which he often gave them, they somehow never
felt the charge of him as a weariness.

We left him a boy beginning Latin with Mr. Sewell in company with the
little Mara. This arrangement progressed prosperously for a time, and
the good clergyman, all whose ideas of education ran through the halls
of a college, began to have hopes of turning out a choice scholar. But
when the boy's ship of life came into the breakers of that narrow and
intricate channel which divides boyhood from manhood, the difficulties
that had always attended his guidance and management wore an intensified
form. How much family happiness is wrecked just then and there! How many
mothers' and sisters' hearts are broken in the wild and confused
tossings and tearings of that stormy transition! A whole new nature is
blindly upheaving itself, with cravings and clamorings, which neither
the boy himself nor often surr