"That's your commission," he said smilingly, "on unexpected good fortune. And I shall be so sorry to lose you. I wish it was the first of August instead of the last, or that you didn't want to go back to school."
CHAPTER XVIII
SUNDRY DISSIPATIONS
The schools were all opened again. Hanny wasn't too big to go to Mrs. Craven's, indeed her school commenced with some girls two or three years older. Ben went to work, starting off in the morning with John. Jim felt rather lonely.
His best girl had been undeniably "snifty" to him. Something had happened to her at last. Through a friend her father had secured a position in the Custom House. It was not very high, but it had an exalted sound. And instead of the paltry five hundred dollars he earned at the shoe store, the salary was a thousand. They were going to move around in First Avenue. Hanny was sorry that it was a few doors above Mrs. Craven's. If Lily had only gone out of the neighborhood!
Of course she disdained the public school. She was going to Rutgers. She held her head very high as they went back and forth during the removal, and stared at Hanny as if she had never known her.
But there were so many things to interest Hanny. Sometimes she read the paper to her father, and it was filled with threats and excitements. In the year before, the independence of Texas had been consented to by Mexico on condition that her separate existence should be maintained. But on the Fourth of July, at a convention, the people had accepted some terms offered by the United States, and declared for annexation. For fear of a sudden alarm General Zachary Taylor had been sent with an army of occupation, and Commodore Connor with a squadron of naval vessels to the Gulf of Mexico. The talk of war ran high.
Then we were in a difficulty with England about some Oregon boundaries. "The whole of Oregon or none," was the cry. England was given a year's notice that steps would be taken to bring the question to a settlement. Timid people declared that wild land was not worth quarrelling about.
If you could see an atlas of those days I think you would be rather surprised, and we are all convinced now that geography is by no means an exact science. The little girl and her father studied it all out. There was big, unwieldy Oregon. There were British America and Russian America. There were Nova Zembla and Spitzbergen, and though there were dreams of an open Polar Sea, no one was disturbing it. We had a great American Desert, and some wild lands the other side of the Rocky Mountains. An intrepid young explorer, John Charles Frémont, had discovered an inland sea which he had named Salt Lake, and then gone up to Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River.