I was a boy. I had sometimes been to the little seaport near where I lived, and had watched the ships and had longed to be a sailor.
“But my father would not hear of it. He wanted me to stay at home and be a farmer like himself. I tried to like farming, but I could not, and so one day I sat down on a log and thought it all out, and that night I ran away and shipped as a cabin boy.”
“How splendid!” said Hal.
“It doesn’t look very splendid to me,” said old Andrew. “If I had stayed at home I might have had a farm of my own now, instead of having to hire out like any other common man. And I would never have had the thought of how I broke my mother’s heart, to trouble me all these fifty years.”
Hal began to think that perhaps it was not such a spirited thing to run away as he had thought. At all events he said to himself, as he squeezed his mamma’s hand, he would never