“PINNY, SIR? JUST ONE PINNY.”
“O, yes, to be sure. Here are pennies for you. Go!”
I knew of a poor Irishman who was brought in there at the hospital a few days before badly “broken up” from a fall on Twenty-sixth Street. His name was John Murphy; they are all named Murphy, or something similar; so it was useless to ask the child her father’s name—probably it would have been Murphy.
The conversation had the good effect of arousing me from my lethargy to action. I must not stay in this metropolis and starve. I could not remain and beg, like the Irish girl.
I went to Professor ——, the dean, and requested him to take back my diploma, and let me have sufficient money to carry me home. He complied—God bless him!—and I took the Sound steamer that afternoon for the land of my nativity. What cared I if I was a second-class passenger; I would in two days see my wife and my child!
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I had reached home, and was in the bosom of my family once more, and amongst my friends, in a Christian land; for which I “thanked God, and took courage.”
“Then pledged me the wine-cup, and fondly I swore
Ne’er from my home and my weeping friends to part;
My children kissed me a thousand times o’er;
My wife sobbed aloud in her fullness of heart.”
I had a “call” to practise in a country town twenty-five miles from E——, where my family was to remain a few days till I had secured a house to cover their heads amongst the good friends who were to become my future patrons, as a few of them had been previous to my going to college. The stage, a one-horse affair, called for my trunk, medicine-case, etc., and, having no money with which to pay my fare, I told the driver that “I would walk along,” while he picked up another passenger in an opposite direction, “and if he overtook me on the road before I got a ride with some one going to S——, he could take me in.”
I walked bravely along a mile or more, and, hearing the stage coming, I stepped from the road-side, secreting myself beneath a friendly tree till he drove past. Issuing from my hiding-place, I trudged along till noon. My darling little wife had taken the precaution to place in my oversack pocket some doughnuts and cheese, and, when I had reached a clear, running brook, I sat myself down upon a log, under the shade of the woods, and partook of my very frugal meal, quenching my thirst from the waters of the brook, which, like Diogenes, I raised in the hollow of my hand.