hich was
deliciously soft to my hand and shone like a mirror from much reflective
stroking. Presently my mother would notice and with a smile she would
put down my hand, but a few moments later up it would come and would
continue its stroking. For I felt both abused and puzzled. What was
there in the talk of the large white-haired old man in the pulpit to
make my mother's eyes so queer, to make her sit so stiff and still? What
good would it do me when I grew up to say that I had heard him?

"I don't believe I will ever say it," I reasoned doggedly to myself.
"And even if I do, I don't believe any other man will care whether I say
it to him or not." I felt sure my father wouldn't. He never even came to
church.

At the thought of my strange silent father, my mind leaped to his
warehouse, his dock, the ships and the harbor. Like him, they were all
so strange. And my hands grew a little cold and moist as I thought of
the terribly risky thing I had planned to do all by myself that very
afternoon. I thought about it for a long time with my eyes tight shut.
Then the voice of the minister brought me back, I found myself sitting
here in church and went on with this less shivery thinking.

"I wouldn't care myself," I decided. "If I were a man and another man
met me on the street and said, 'Look here. When I was a boy I heard
Henry Ward Beecher before he died,' I guess I would just say to him,
'You mind your business and I'll mind mine.'" This phrase I had heard
from the corner grocer, and I liked the sound of it. I repeated it now
with an added zest.

Again I opened my eyes and again I found myself here in church. Still
here. I heaved a weary sigh.

"If you were dead already," I thought as I looked up at the preacher,
"my mother wouldn't bring me here." I found this an exceedingly cheering
thought. I had once overheard our cook Anny describe how her old father
had dropped dead. I eyed the old minister hopefully.

But what was this he was saying! Something about "the harbor of life."
The harbor! In an instant I was listening hard, for this was something I
knew about.

"Safe into the harbor," I heard him say. "Home to the harbor at last to
rest." And then, while he passed on to something else, something I
_didn't_ know about, I settled disgustedly back in the pew.

"You chump," I thought contemptuously. To hear him talk you would have
thought the harbor was a place to feel quite safe in, a place to snuggle
down in, a nice