.

"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 th