“And so you sail to-morrow, Will? I shall miss you.”

“Yes; I’m bound to see the world. I’ve been beating my wings in desperation against the wires of my cage these three years. I know every stick, and stone, and stump in this odious village by heart, as well as I do those stereotyped sermons of Parson Grey’s. They say he calls me ‘a scapegrace’—pity I should have the name without the game,” said he, bitterly. “I haven’t room here to run the length of my chain. I’ll show him what I can do in a wider field of action.”

“But how did you bring your father over?”

“Oh, he’s very glad to be rid of me; quite disgusted because I’ve no fancy for seeing corn and oats grow. The truth is, every father knows at once too much and too little about his own son; the old gentleman never understood me; he soured my temper, which is originally none of the best, roused all the worst feelings in my nature, and is constantly driving me from instead of to the point he would have me reach.”

“And your mother?”

“Well, there you have me; that’s the only humanized portion of my heart—the only soft spot in it. She came to my bed-side last night, after she thought I was asleep, gently kissed my forehead, and then knelt by my bed-side. Harry, I’ve been wandering round the fields all the morning, to try to get rid of that prayer. Old Parson Grey might preach at me till the millennium, and he wouldn’t move me any more than that stone. It makes all the difference in the world when you know a person feels what they are praying about. I’m wild and reckless and wicked, I suppose; but I shall never be an infidel while I can remember my mother. You should see the way she bears my father’s impetuous temper; that’s grace, not nature, Harry; but don’t let us talk about it—I only wish my parting with her was well over. Good-bye; God bless you, Harry; you’ll hear from me, if the fishes don’t make a supper of me;” and Will left his friend and entered the cottage.

Will’s mother was moving nervously and restlessly about, tying up all sorts of mysterious little parcels that only mothers think of, “in case he should be sick,” or in case he should be this, that, or the other, interrupted occasionally by exclamations like this from the old farmer: “Fudge—stuff—great overgrown baby—making a fool of him—never be out of leading strings;” and then turning short about and facing Will as he entered, he said,

“Well, sir, look in your sea-chest, and you’ll find gingerbread and physic, darning-needles and tracts, ‘bitters’ and Bibles, peppermint and old linen rags, and opodeldoc. Pshaw! I was more of a man than you are when I was nine years old. Your mother always made a fool of you, and that was entirely unnecessary, too, for you were always short of what is called common sense. You needn’t tell the captain you went to sea because you didn’t know enough to be a landsman; or that you never did any thing right in your life, except by accident. You are as like that ne’er do well Jack Halpine, as two peas. If there is anything in you, I hope the salt water will fetch it out. Come, your mother has your supper ready, I see.”

Mrs. Low’s hand trembled as she passed her boy’s cup. It was his last meal under that roof for many a long day. She did not trust herself to speak—her heart was too full. She heard all his father so injudiciously said to him, and she knew too well from former experience the effect it would have upon his impetuous, fiery spirit. She had only to oppose to it a mother’s prayers, and tears, and all-enduring love. She never condemned in Will’s hearing, any of his father’s philippics; always excusing him with the general remark that he didn’t understand him. Alone, she mourned over it; and when with her husband, tried to place matters on a better footing for both parties.

Will noted his mother’s swollen eyelids; he saw his favorite little tea-cakes that she had busied herself in preparing for him, and he ate and drank what she gave him, without tasting a morsel he swallowed, listening for the hundredth time to his father’s account of “what he did when he was a young man.”

“Just half an hour, Will,” said his father, “before you start; run up and see if you have forgotten any of your duds.”

It was the little room he had always called his own. How many nights he had lain there listening to the rain pattering on the low roof; how many mornings awakened by the chirp of the robin in the apple-tree under the window. There was the little bed with its snowy covering, and the thousand and one little comforts prepared by his mother’s hand. He turned his head—she was at his side, her arms about his neck. “God keep my boy!” was all she could utter. He knelt at her feet as in the days of childhood, and from those wayward lips came this tearful prayer, “Oh God, spare my mother, that I may look upon her face again in this world!”

Oh, in after days, when that voice had died out from under the parental roof, how sacred was that spot to her who gave him birth! There was hope for the boy! he had recognized his mother’s God. By that invisible silken cord she still held the wanderer, though broad seas roll between.

Letters came to Moss Glen—at stated intervals, then more irregularly, picturing only the bright spots in his sailor life (for Will was proud, and they were to be scanned by his father’s eye.) The usual temptations of a sailor’s life when in port were not unknown to him. Of every cup the syren Pleasure held to his lips, he drank to the dregs; but there were moments in his maddest revels, when that angel whisper, “God keep my boy,” palsied his daring hand, and arrested the half-uttered oath. Disgusted with himself, he would turn aside for an instant, but only to drown again more recklessly “that still small torturing voice.”

“You’re a stranger in these parts,” said a rough farmer to a sun-burnt traveller. “Look as though you’d been in foreign parts.”

“Do I?” said Will, slouching his hat over his eyes. “Who lives in that little cottage under the hill?”

“Old Farmer Low—and a tough customer he is, too; it’s a word and a blow with him. The old lady has had a hard time of it, good as she is, to put up with all his kinks and quirks. She bore it very well till the lad went away; and then she began to droop like a willow in a storm, and lose all heart, like. Doctor’s stuff didn’t do any good, as long as she got no news of the boy. She’s to be buried this afternoon, sir.”

Poor Will staid to hear no more, but tottered in the direction of the cottage. He asked no leave to enter, but passed over the threshold into the little “best parlor,” and found himself alone with the dead. It was too true! Dumb were the lips that should have welcomed him; and the arms that should have enfolded him were crossed peacefully over the heart that beat true to him till the last.

Conscience did its office. Long years of mad folly passed in swift review before him; and over that insensible form a vow was made, and registered in Heaven.

“Your mother should have lived to see this day, Will,” said a gray-haired old man, as he leaned on the arm of the clergyman, and passed into the village church.

“Bless God, my dear father, there is ‘joy in Heaven over one sinner that repenteth;’ and of all the angel band, there is one seraph hand that sweeps more rapturously its harp to-day for ‘the lost that is found.’”