"But I'm a man now, teacher," he said. "I shall be twenty in June, and life is short. A man hasn't got time for everything. He'd be a fool to waste it crying for what he didn't happen to have. He'd better push along and work for the best. I meant to tell you. I'm going to sea, teacher! I'm going trading. I was down to New Bedford, to see Captain Sparhauk yesterday, for I was out with him once before, and got a good deal of the hang of the business then; and he offered me a place on his ship next time he sails."
Luther stood with flushed face, regarding me with a bright restless look of inquiry in his eyes.
"Are you going away, really, Luther? I'm very sorry!" I said.
"You don't care! what do you care?" he exclaimed almost rudely, with an unnatural touch of hardness in his laugh. "It's the way you talk to all the rest. A fellow might get to thinking too much about it. A fellow might get to caring—if he believed it—I don't."
"What makes you think I shouldn't care if you were going away?" I continued, with the dispassionately gentle and reproving tone I considered it wisest to assume on the occasion. "I should care, I should be very sorry. Come and sit down here, please, and tell me all about it, when you are going, and where, and what you are going for?"
Luther came slowly back to the light. He seemed verily to have grown older and handsomer in a moment. I experienced a deeper feeling of regret than ever before, that the circumstances of his life could not have been conducive to heroism.
"The captain couldn't tell me just when he should sail," said he; "and I'm going to get money. I know a good deal of the Spanish and Portugal, I learned to talk them before—and I shall go to a great many places, I may not come back when the ship does. Say, what strange eyes you've got, teacher; now they're brown—and now, they're black, and now, they're a sort of—a—purplish gray."
"Oh, my dear boy," I exclaimed, with a sudden accession of wisdom, sighing deeply; "you ought not to talk to me about the color of my eyes." At the same time to deepen the effect of this condescending tenderness, I pushed back lightly from his forehead a stray lock of hair that was hanging there.
"Don't do that!" the boy cried with startling impetuosity. "Don't call me that again! I mean, teacher," he went on in a gentler tone, though none the less excitedly;—"if you should know somebody, that had set his heart on something, very much, and didn't want anything else if he couldn't have that, and if he should know that he hadn't any right to ask for it now, but go off and work for it real hard, and, maybe come back lucky in a few years, with a right to ask for it then;—do you think, teacher, that there'd be any chance of his finding—of his getting what he wanted most? If you were in anybody's place, now, teacher, would you give him a word of encouragement to try?"
"I think that the person you speak of would be much more likely to succeed in a practical undertaking, without any hallucination of that sort before his eyes—and if, as you say, it isn't right that he should ask for it now, can we predict that it would be any more reasonable and expedient in the future? These idle fancies of ours soon pass away, Luther, and will look laughable and grotesque enough to us by and by. Life is so full of changes, and people change, oh, so much!"