e repeated to himself,--"my journey! why shouldn't I
start on it now? Start off, and never come back?"

It was a very little thing, after all, which annoyed him, but the
mention of it always touched a sore nerve of his nature. A dozen years
before, when a boy at school, he had made a temporary friendship with
another boy of his age, and had one day said to the latter, in the
warmth of his first generous confidence: "When I am a little older,
I shall make a great journey, and come back rich, and buy Whitney's
place!"

Now, Whitney's place, with its stately old brick mansion, its avenue of
silver firs, and its two hundred acres of clean, warm-lying land, was
the finest, the most aristocratic property in all the neighborhood,
and the boy-friend could not resist the temptation of repeating Jacob's
grand design, for the endless amusement of the school. The betrayal hurt
Jacob more keenly than the ridicule. It left a wound that never ceased
to rankle; yet, with the inconceivable perversity of unthinking
natures, precisely this joke (as the people supposed it to be) had been
perpetuated, until "Jake Flint's Journey" was a synonyme for any absurd
or extravagant expectation. Perhaps no one imagined how much pain he was
keeping alive; for almost any other man than Jacob would have joined
in the laugh against himself and thus good-naturedly buried the joke in
time. "He's used to that," the people said, like Becky Morton, and they
really supposed there was nothing unkind in the remark!

After Jacob had passed the thickets and entered the lonely hollow in
which his father's house lay, his pace became slower and slower.

He looked at the shabby old building, just touched by the moonlight
behind the swaying shadows of the weeping-willow, stopped, looked again,
and finally seated himself on a stump beside the path.

"If I knew what to do!" he said to himself, rocking backwards and
forwards, with his hands clasped over his knees,--"if I knew what to
do!"

The spiritual tension of the evening reached its climax: he could bear
no more. With a strong bodily shudder his tears burst forth, and the
passion of his weeping filled him from head to foot. How long he wept
he knew not; it seemed as if the hot fountains would never run dry.
Suddenly and startlingly a hand fell upon his shoulder.

"Boy, what does this mean?"

It was his father who stood before him.

Jacob looked up like some shy animal brought to bay, his eyes full of a
fe