board coffin made by a
neighbor who worked in the shipyard, he admired the coffin, but could
not cry even when the priest pinched him and called him hard-hearted. He
could not cry, even with his twisted eye. His mother, as a lovable
being, had gone out of his life, even before she died. He could only
think what a beautiful coffin she had and what a great man it was who
made it. And this man who made the coffin gave him a penny--perhaps
because the boy so appreciated his handiwork.

Stephen, unconsciously, won him on the side of art.

It's a terrible thing to kill love in the heart of a child. That popular
belief that we are "born in sin and conceived in iniquity," Girard once
said was true in his case, at least.

Yet so wondrous are the works of God, the hate and brutality visited
upon their child went into the making of his strong and self-reliant
character. He never said, "My mother's religion is good enough for me."
He despised her religion, and that of the Friars Gray who punished boys
to make them good. His mind turned inward--he became silent, secretive,
self-centered, and his repulsive exterior served him well as a tough
husk to hide his finer emotions.

In a few months--or was it a few weeks--after his mother's death, the
father married again. The stepmother was no improvement on the mother.
She had lofty ideas of discipline and being "minded." No doubt that
little Stephen, crooked in eyes, crooked in body, short and swart, with
brown, bare legs, was stubborn and wilful. He looked the part all right.
His brown, bare legs were a temptation for the stepmother's willow
switch. He decided to relieve everybody of the temptation to switch his
legs by running away to sea and taking his brown, bare legs with him.
There was a ship at the docks about to sail for the West Indies. He
could secrete himself among the bales and barrels, and once the ship was
out of port he would come out and take chances on being accepted as
cabin-boy. They could do no more than throw him overboard, anyway!

He told his little sisters of his intention. They cried, but he didn't.
He hadn't cried since he was eight years old, and his cheerful
biographer says he never shed a tear afterward, and I guess that is so.

At two o'clock in the morning, he whispered good-by to his little
sleeping sisters. He did not kiss them--he never kissed anybody in his
whole life, his biographer says, and I guess that may be so, too. He
stole downstairs and o