No More Learning

I will write to my uncle and agree to his offer. '

'Now you must go home,' she said. 'You must not keep your mother
waiting for her tea. There! I have raked the fire out. We must not
forget to lock the door behind us. '

As they stood on the doorstep the wind blew a whirl of dead leaves
about them.

'They are my old thoughts,' he said; 'see, they are all withered. '

They walked together silently. At the vicarage he left her and went
homeward.

The deserted flour-store at the corner of two roads, the house that
had been burnt hollow ten years before and still lifted its blackened
beams, the straggling and leafless fruit-trees rising above garden
walls, the church where he was christened--these foster-mothers of his
infancy seemed to nod and shake their heads over him.

'Mother,' he said, hurriedly entering the room, 'we are going to
London. '

'As you wish. I always knew you would be a rolling stone,' she
answered, and went out to tell the servant that as soon as she had
finished the week's washing they must pack up everything, for they were
going to London.

'Yes, we must pack up,' said the old peasant; she did not stop peeling
the onion in her hand--she had not comprehended.
In the middle of the
night she suddenly started up in bed with a pale face and a prayer to
the Virgin whose image hung over her head--she had now comprehended.


IV

On January the 5th, about two in the afternoon, Sherman sat on the
deck of the steamer _Lavinia_ enjoying a period of sunshine between
two showers. The steamer _Lavinia_ was a cattle-boat. It had been his
wish to travel by some more expensive route, but his mother, with
her old-fashioned ideas of duty, would not hear of it, and now, as
he foresaw, was extremely uncomfortable below, while he, who was a
good sailor, was pretty happy on deck, and would have been quite so
if the pigs would only tire of their continual squealing. With the
exception of a very dirty old woman sitting by a crate of geese, all
the passengers but himself were below. This old woman made the journey
monthly with geese for the Liverpool market.

Sherman was dreaming. He began to feel very desolate, and commenced
a letter to Mary Carton in his notebook to state this fact. He was
a laborious and unpractised writer, and found it helped him to make
a pencil copy. Sometimes he stopped and watched the puffin sleeping
on the waves. Each one of them had its head tucked in in a somewhat
different way. 'That is because their characters are different,' he
thought.

Gradually he began to notice a great many corks floating by, one after
the other. The old woman saw them too, and said, waking out of a half
sleep: 'Misther John Sherman, we will be in the Mersey before evening.
Why are ye goin' among them savages in London, Misther John? Why don't
ye stay among your own people--for what have we in this life but a
mouthful of air?