Harry Fenimore's Principles

by Isabel Thompson Hopkins

Aleck walked on very busy with his thoughts, but this time they had nothing to do with lessons, nor even with examination-day, unless as an event that was to knock away his stays and launch him forth to make such headway as he might out of the quiet harbor of his schooldays. He had no fear of breasting contrary winds, or of ploughing the rough waves of life with a stout heart; the only trouble was to decide on the port he wished to clear for; and this question, though it would have been easy enough if he had had only himself to consult, seemed balanced and counterbalanced whichever way he turned. But Carter never had a suspicion that anything worried him as they worked away on the iceboat that afternoon; he only thought Aleck was the handsomest fellow and the best company in the world, and wondered how it was everything went so smoothly where he was, the rough places always melting down, as the ice and snow were vanishing outside under the shining of the March sun.

He couldn’t help telling him so at last, and Aleck laughed.

“Do they?” he said, “I didn’t know they did; but there’s something in one’s way of looking at things, I suppose. If the sun were to pull a cloud of disgust over his face every time he saw a hummock of ice, they’d be likely to hold on a little longer. Looking straight at an ugly thing, with a bright face of your own, works pretty well generally, I think;” but when Carter was gone, and lessons pretty well out of the way, Aleck had need to try his own maxim, for the question that had been on his own mind in the morning came up again in full force, and didn’t look any smoother or rounder for its brief absence.

It wasn’t a brown-stone front, like Hal Fenimore’s, in the library of which Aleck sat, but a bit of a gothic cottage slipped in between two large brick houses, with a clear sunset outlook from the rear, and a bay-window trailing with vines in front, while a tiny wing, that had begged room for itself on one side, formed a conservatory, from the windows of which flowers of every hue had refreshed the eyes of the passers-by through all the long, dreary winter months. If Creepy could but once have rested his eyes upon them! His most gorgeous dreams of what this world might be would have paled into gray twilight before their unimagined beauty.

The brick houses on either side stood guard over the cottage, as if they had taken it up for a pet, and inside its walls everything seemed to be petted as well. In every nook and corner stood some delicate, graceful thing, and every article of furniture, every picture on the walls, and every ornament about the room, seemed chosen to be loved. But the fairest ornament of all to Aleck’s eyes was the sister from whom everything else had taken its coloring and its tone, and he glanced involuntarily up from his book now and then to watch the graceful movements of her white fingers as they followed the pattern of her embroidery.

“I don’t believe there’s a fellow in the city that’s got anything to compare with her,” he thought as his eye rested on the poise of the beautiful head, the golden hair drawn back in waves and ripples from her forehead, the soft eyes drooped over their work, and the half-smile with which she followed her thoughts, whatever they might be. “I know there isn’t,” and down he plunged again into syntax, roots, and terminations.

The brown eyes were raised at him just then, and let the embroidery wait a moment, while their owner thought what a manly, handsome fellow Aleck was, and how like his father, and how proud she should be some day when she should see him taking his father’s place in his profession, his father’s old friends welcoming him, and new ones of his own rising up on every side. There were a good many sacrifices to be made, and a good deal of waiting to be done, before that day should come, but it would repay them all a thousand times.

Aleck lost all this, deep in the mazes of an irregular verb, but he was out again by the time the eyes had gone back to their embroidery, and snatched a minute for another look and thought of his own.

“Poor old Nell!” he said to himself, “she has set her heart on making a lawyer of me, and I—” up and down went the balances again, and then the lesson would have attention once more.