It was one of those golden days not so frequent in our autumnal season as to lose the charm of novelty, or the full sense of their value in redeeming its general sternness; and it seemed to the boys as if nature herself shared in the universal delight. The spacious ground encircling Mr. Blair's residence afforded ample scope for their pastimes, and their dinner was served under the trees in the yard.
To those who had known Michael Hennessy only as the thoughtless, frolicsome boy, it did not seem possible that a few short weeks could have wrought the change now apparent in him. The fiery trial through which he had passed accomplished the work of time upon his character, and he emerged from it purified and matured.
His face still wore the sunny smile that had made it a joy to all, but the light which lingered upon it was chastened and subdued. His manners still charmed by the warm, ingenuous frankness that made him the village pet, but their former reckless gayety was sobered by the spirit of piety, which had established its abode within his youthful heart from the moment when the blessed hand of adversity opened wide its portals, and prepared it to become thenceforth a chosen home of the celestial guest.
He was more than ever the favorite of the boys, and the leader in all their sports; but his devotion to study was more faithful, his attention to every religious duty more regular, and his conduct under all circumstances more exemplary than ever before.
Soon after his return, farmer Brown celebrated the event by inviting the school—without any exceptions this time—to spend another day at the farm, as the season for gathering nuts had arrived. Such a gay time as they had! whisking the deep beds of fallen leaves about in search for hidden treasures, and watching the squirrels gleaning in the path from which they had thrown off nature's covering for stray nuts, whose hiding places had thus been revealed.
The day passed delightfully, but not, like their former holidays, in unalloyed and careless pleasure. The thought would intrude upon its happiest moments, that their little band was soon to be broken up, and that this was to be the last occasion upon which they would all meet in the hey-day of boyish glee, to join in boyish pastimes.
For the change was now stealing upon them apace which presses closely on the footsteps of boyhood—and from which our "young Vermonters" were not to be exempted—when one and another must pass from its arena, to enter upon a new stage of action and form new associations. When the dear old school-house, with all the memories that were to link it with the shifting scenes of each single life—to which it had been the starting-point in quest of knowledge—was to be exchanged for college halls, the office, the counter, or the farm, with all their excitements, laborious duties, and temptations, and their weary anxieties.
The next week after their visit to the farm, Frank Blair took his leave of home and friends to enter the naval school at B——. Not long after, George Wingate, Henry Howe, and Johnny Hart entered the College of the Holy Cross. The same week, Patrick Casey was appointed clerk in a railroad office, and Dennis Sullivan left to take his place as clerk in a wholesale establishment in Boston.
Who shall say what pangs all these changes, so easily related, and so much a matter of course in this changeful world, cost the young exiles now banished from the sheltering bosom of home, and standing for the first time face to face with the stern realities of life? The homesick looking back to the dear and peaceful past, the timid, shrinking glances into the dim vista of the dreaded future—the one bathed in all the effulgence of morning, the other bearing already upon its sombre wings foreshadowings of the night!
And who shall describe the loneliness of each home from which the brightest, warmest ray of sunshine had been stricken, when the school-boy with his "shining morning face" vanished from its precincts, to return no more for ever with the light of his young life upon his brow?