“Did it? I tell you I could have sold myself for a yellow dog any minute since. I didn’t see it at the time; but if I ever get through with this, I’m going to start things on a different tack somehow. The only trouble is to see just how.”
“I’ll tell you how,” said Aleck. “If you could manage to remember how the Lord has treated us, and that the only way to make a gentleman or a Christian, is the one he taught us, to love him first, and your neighbor as yourself.”
“Yes, but it makes a fellow too much of a prig to keep going over all that in his mind all the time, and measuring a text to everything he does or says.”
“Well, don’t go over it in your mind then,” said Aleck smiling; “just feel it in your heart, and you’ll be all right without stopping to measure anything when the time comes.”
“I don’t know,” said Carter, “but I must manage it somehow; I’ll never be mean enough to make anybody else feel mean again, if I can help it. But what’s the professor going to do about it? Has he found out anything yet?”
“I don’t know; I think he’s got an idea he’d have to come into the graduating class, and he don’t like to break that up. And I heard the doctor begging him not to make any trouble.”
“Good for him,” said Carter, with a grateful warming at his heart; “it would make a horrid mess for me at home if I got into trouble just now. The executive has some pretty strict notions, and I should be likely to lose something I’ve been fighting hard for, for a year. Do you know what I want to strike for when I’ve done with Latin grammar and all that rubbish? I want to go to sea, and my father wants me in the counting-house with him. Think of that! Mounted up on a stool behind a set of leather-covered books, with never a chance to stretch yourself, or breathe the air from morning till night, and smelling of everything from gunny-bags up.”
“And what do you expect to smell if you get aboard ship?” asked Aleck laughing.
“Oh, I don’t know; horrid things enough, I suppose, but there will always be a sniff of the glorious old ocean, and the feeling you’re a free man, any how. That is to say, after you get on to the quarter-deck, and that’s what I shall aim for, and make it too, as fast as those things can be done. There are ships enough coming to the counting-house every year to give all the boys in the firm good berths if they wanted them; and as I’m the only one that does, it would seem pretty tough if I couldn’t have one. The counting-house! Bah!”
“Where do you think I’m going, if you think the counting-house so bad?” asked Aleck.