Afloat and Ashore | Page 2

the high ideal I had originally, and have still, of one who would follow the Master; but, in your wholesale condemnation of the law and lawyers, judging on the ex uno disce omnes principle and hastily, you should remember that all solicitors need not necessarily be rogues because one of their number has a somewhat evil reputation. Sharpe is rather a black sheep according to all report; still, my son, in connection with such rumours we ought to bear in mind the comforting fact that there is a stratum of good even in the worst dispositions, which can be found by those who seek diligently for it, and do not merely try to pick out the bad. Who knows but that Sharpe may have his good points like others? But, to return to our theme--the vexed question as to which should be your occupation in life. As you have decided against the church and the law, giving me your reasons for coming to an adverse conclusion in each instance, pray, young gentleman, tell me what are your objections to the medical profession?"
"Oh, father!" I replied laughing, he spoke in so comical a way and with such a queer twinkle in his eye, "I shouldn't care at all to be only a poor country surgeon like Doctor Jollop, tramping about day and night through dirty lanes and sawing off people's sore legs, or else feeling their pulses and giving them physic; although, I think it would be good fun, father, wouldn't it, just when some of those stupid folk, who are always imagining themselves ill wanted to speak about their fancied ailments, to shut them up by saying, `Show me your tongue,' as Doctor Jollop bawls out to deaf old Molly the moment she begins to tell him of her aches and pains? I think he does it on purpose."
Father chuckled.
"Not a bad idea that," said he; "and our friend the doctor must have the credit of being the first man who ever succeeded in making a woman hold her tongue, a consummation most devoutly to be wished-for sometimes-- though I don't know what your dear mother would say if she heard me give utterance to so heretical and ungallant a doctrine in reference to the sex."
"Why, here is mother now!" I exclaimed, interrupting him in my surprise at seeing her; it being most unusual for her to leave the house at that hour in the afternoon, which was generally devoted to Nellie's music lesson, a task she always superintended. "She's coming up the garden with a letter in her hand."
"I think I know what that letter contains," said father, not a bit excited like me; "for, unless I'm much mistaken, it refers to the very subject about which we've been talking, Allan,--your going to sea."
"Does it?" I cried, pitching my cap up in the air in my enthusiasm and catching it again dexterously, shouting out the while the refrain of the old song-- "The sea, the sea, a sailor's life for me! Hurrah! Hurrah!"
Father sighed, and resumed his "quarter-deck walk," as mother termed it, backwards and forwards along the little path under the old elm-tree in front of the summer-house, with its bare branches stretched out like a giant's fingers clutching at the sky, always turning when he got up to the lilac bush and retracing his steps slowly and deliberately, as if anxious to tread in his former footprints in the very centre of the box- edged walk.
I think I can see him now: his face, which always had such a bright genial look when he smiled, and seemed to light up suddenly from within when he turned to speak to you, wearing a somewhat sad and troubled air, and a far-away thoughtful expression in his eyes that was generally there when he was having a mental wrestle with some difficulty, or trying to solve one of those intricate social problems that were being continually submitted for his consideration. And yet, at first glance, a stranger would hardly have taken him to be a clergyman; for he had on an old brown shooting-jacket very much the worse for wear, and was smoking one of those long clay pipes that are called "churchwardens," discoloured by age and the oil of tobacco, and which he had lit and let out and relit again half a dozen times at least during our talk.
"Very unorthodox," some critical people will say.
Aye, possibly so; but if these censors only knew father personally, and saw how he fulfilled his mission of visiting the fatherless and widow in their affliction, in addition to preaching the gospel and so winning souls to heaven, and how he was liked and loved by every one in the parish; perhaps they could condone his "sin of omission" in the matter of