her low willow rocking-chair barely
moving at the touch of her foot on the fender.

But when it was over; when Tom, his voice breaking in spite of his
efforts to control it, told her that he could walk in the way she had
chosen for him only at the price a conscious hypocrite must pay, she
reached up quickly and took him in her arms and wept over him as those
who sorrow without hope, crying again and again, _"O my son Absalom, my
son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son,
my son!"_

XVIII

THE AWAKENING

Once in a lifetime for every youngling climbing the facile or difficult
slope of the years there comes a day of realization, of a sudden
extension of vision, of Rubicon-crossing from the hither shore of joyous
and irresponsible adolescence to that further one of conscious
grapplings with the adult fact.

For Thomas Jefferson, grinding tenaciously in the Boston technical
school, whither he had gone late in the winter of Beersheban discontent,
the stream-crossing fell in the spring of the panic year 1893, what time
he was twenty-one, a quarter-back on his college eleven, fit, hardy,
studious and athletic; a pace-setter for his fellows and the pride of
the faculty, but still little more than an overgrown, care-free boy in
his outlook on life. Glimpses there had been over into the Promised Land
of manhood, but the brimming cup of college work and play quaffed in
health-giving heartiness is the elixir of youth. The speculative habit
of the boy slept in the college undergraduate. The days were full, each
of the things of itself, and if Tom looked forward to the workaday
future,--as he did by times,--the boyish impatience to be at it was
gone. Chiawassee Consolidated was moderately prosperous; the home
letters were mere chronicles of sleepy Paradise. The skies were clear,
and the present was acutely present. Tom studied hard and played hard;
ate like an ogre and slept like a log. And when he finally awoke to find
himself stumbling bewildered on the bank of the epoch-marking Rubicon,
he was over and across before he could realize how so narrow a stream
should fill so vast a chasm.

The call of the ferryman--to keep the figure whole--was a letter from
his father, a letter longer than the commonplace chronicles, and
painfully written with the mechanic hand on both sides of a company
letter-head. Caleb Gordon wrote chiefly of business. Mutterings of the
storm of financial depression were