And Sol's mother didn't say anything, either, but she opened her letter and read it. It didn't take very long to read it but it took longer than Captain Solomon's. And the tears came into her eyes as she handed the letter to Captain Solomon and asked him not to be hard on the poor boy but to be gentle with him, for he must have felt that very same way when he first went to sea.
And Captain Solomon read her letter and then he sat without saying anything for a long time, looking out of the window. Perhaps he didn't see the things that were there; perhaps, instead of the fields of tall grass and of wheat, waving in the breeze, he saw the blue ocean sparkling in the sun and stretching away until it met the sky. Perhaps he saw the tall masts and the white sails of the Industry rising far above his head, and felt her buoyant hull under his feet.
Whatever he saw, as he sat there, he laughed aloud, at last, and brought his fist down on the kitchen table.
"Let him go!" he said. "It's in the blood. The sea's salt is in the blood and the only thing that will take it out is the sea itself. He can no more help it than he can help breathing. I'll write him a letter."
And so it happened that there was a letter for Sol in Captain Jonathan's and Captain Jacob's office the next morning. They didn't know where he was, but they sent to all their ships that were in port to see if he could be found. The Industry happened to be in port, but she was just ready to sail, and she was to sail that afternoon. And it happened that Sol had shipped as one of her crew and he was on board of her. Captain Jonathan and Captain Jacob didn't know that Sol was one of the crew of the Industry, because they didn't generally look over the crew lists any longer, but they left that to the captains and the mates. But when they found Sol, they had him come to their office, and they gave him the letter from his father. And Sol read the letter and he was very happy, and he wrote a long letter to his father.
In that letter he said that he knew, now, that it was very foolish for him to run away, because Captain Solomon would have let him go if he had made him understand how he felt. But Sol had always thought that his father was very stern and he hadn't told him how badly he felt at being kept away from the salt water. It may have been Captain Solomon's fault, too; and when he got Sol's letter he went to a field that was far from the farm-house. But he didn't do any work. He sat there, under a tree that grew beside the stone wall, all the morning looking up at the clouds.
It would be all the more foolish for any boy to run away to sea, now-a-days. For things have changed very much in the last hundred years. Steamers have taken the place of sailing ships, and the crews of the few ships that there are aren't made up of men like Captain Solomon and Sol.
But, when the Industry sailed away from that wharf in Boston for far countries, more than a hundred years ago, Sol was a sailor.