s
out that you have run away from Sunday-school, this morning;
what will she say to you?"

"Why, she will be very likely to punish me," said Rodney; "but
you know I am used to it; and, though decidedly unpleasant, it
does not grate on my nerves as it did a year or two ago. Van
Dyke, my teacher, says I am hardened. But I would rather have a
stroll here, and a flogging after it, than be shut up in school
and church all day to escape it. I wish, Will, that mother was
like your grandfather, and would let me do as I please on
Sunday."

"Now that I am an apprentice," replied Will Manton, "and shut up
in the shop all the week, it would be rather hard to prevent my
having a little sport on Sunday. I think it is necessary to
swallow a little fresh air on Sunday, to blow the sawdust out of
my throat; and to have a game of ball occasionally, to keep my
joints limber, for they get stiff leaning over the work-bench,
shoving the jack-plane, and chiseling out mortices all the
week."

"Well, Will, I, too, get very sick of work," replied the
younger boy. "I do not think I ever shall like it. When I am
roused up early in the morning, and go into the shop, and look
at the tools, and think that, all day long, I must stand and
pull leather strands, while other boys can go free, and take
their sport, and swim, or fish, or hunt, or play, just as they
please, it makes me feel like running away. Now, here am I, a
little more than fourteen years old; and must I spend seven
years in a dirty shop, with the prospect of hard work all my
life? It makes my heart sick to think of it."

The boys threw themselves upon the ground, under the shade of a
large pine, and, reclining against its trunk, remained some
minutes without uttering a word. At length, William Manton,
whose thoughts had evidently been running in the channel opened
by the last remarks of Rodney, said,

"I have often thought of it."

"Thought of what, Will?"

"Of running away."

"Where could you go? What could you do? How could you live?"
were the quick, eager inquiries of Rodney.

"Three questions at once is worse than the catechism," was the
laughing response; "but, though I never learned the answers out
of a book, yet I have them by heart. I will tell you what I have
thought about the matter. You know Captain Ryan?--he was in our
shop last week, and was telling how he came to be a sailor. He
said that his uncle, with whom he lived when he was a boy,
promised him a beati