iction
that a new phase had come over my prospects. When I put aside my own
longings for my father's will; and every time that office life seemed
intolerable to me, and I was tempted to break my bonds, and thought
better of it and settled down again, this thought had always remained
behind: "I will try; and if the worst comes to the worst, and I really
cannot settle down into a clerk, I can but run away then." But
circumstances had altered my case, I felt that now I must make up my
mind for good and all. My father would have to make some little
sacrifices to find the money, and when it was once paid, I could not let
it be in vain. Come what might, I must stick to the office then, and for
life.

Some weeks passed whilst I was turning this over and over in my mind. I
was constantly forgetting things in the office, but Moses Benson helped
me out of every scrape. He was kinder and kinder, so that I often felt
sorry that I could not feel fonder of him, and that his notions of fun
and amusement only disgusted me instead of making us friends. They
convinced me of one thing. My dear mother's chief dread about my going
out of my own country was for the wicked ways I might learn in strange
lands. A town with an unpronounceable name suggested foreign iniquities
to her tender fears, but our own town, where she and everybody we knew
bought everything we daily used, did not frighten her at all. I did not
tell her, but I was quite convinced myself that I might get pretty deep
into mischief in my idle hours, even if I lived within five miles of
home, and had only my uncle's clerks for my comrades.

During these weeks Jem came home for the holidays. He was at a public
school now, which many of our friends regarded as an extravagant folly
on my father's part. We had a very happy time together, and this would
have gone far to keep me at home, if it had not, at the same time,
deepened my disgust with our town, and my companions in the office. In
plain English, the training of two good schools, and the society of boys
superior to himself, had made a gentleman of Jem, and the contrast
between his looks and ways, and manners, and those of my uncle's clerks
were not favourable to the latter. How proud my father was of him! With
me he was in a most irritable mood; and one grumble to which I heard him
give utterance, that it was very inconvenient to have to pay this money
just at the most expensive period of Jem's education, went heavily into