Haste and Waste | Page 4

this wind. I'm sorry it happened so; but that boy didn't mind what
he was about."
"The captain didn't mind what he was about," added Lawry. "He
needn't lay it to me, when it was all his own fault."
"I will cross the lake, and get a horse at Pointville, so that I shall be in
Shoreham by five o'clock," continued the bank director.
Captain John ordered one of the men to pull Mr. Randall and Lawry
ashore in the boat, and in a few minutes they were landed at Port Rock.
CHAPTER II

THE PORT ROCK FERRY
Lawrence Wilford was a full-fledged water-fowl. From his earliest
childhood he had paddled in Lake Champlain. His father had a small
place, consisting of ten acres of land with a small cottage; but it was
still encumbered with a mortgage, as it had been for twenty years,
though the note had passed through several hands, and had been three
times renewed. John Wilford was not a very sagacious nor a very
energetic man, and had not distinguished himself in the race for wealth
or for fame. He wanted to be rich, but he was not willing to pay the
price of riches.
His place was a short distance from the village of Port Rock, and John
Wilford, at the time he had purchased the land and built his house, had
established a ferry, which had been, and was still, his principal means
of support; for there was considerable travel between Port Rock and
Pointville, on the Vermont side of the lake.
The ferryman was a poor man, and was likely to remain a poor man to
the end of his life. Hardly a day passed in which he did not sigh to be
rich, and complain of the unequal and unjust distribution of property.
He could point to a score of men who had not worked half so hard as he
had, in his own opinion, that had made fortunes, or at least won a
competence, while he was as poor as ever, and in danger of having his
place taken away from him. People said that John Wilford was lazy;
that he did not make the most of his land, and that his ferry, with closer
attention to the wants of passengers, might be made to pay double the
amount he made from it. He permitted the weeds to grow in his garden,
and compelled people to wait by the hour for a passage across the lake.
John Wilford wondered that he could not grow rich, that he could not
pay off the mortgage on his place. He seldom sat down to dinner
without grumbling at his hard lot. His wife was a sensible woman. She
did not wonder that he did not grow rich; only that he contrived to keep
out of the poorhouse. She was the mother of eight children, and if he
had been half as smart as she was, prosperity would have smiled upon
the family. As it was, her life was filled up with struggles to make the
ends meet; but, though she had the worst of it, she did not complain,

and did all she could to comfort and encourage her thriftless husband.
The oldest son was as near like his father as one person could be like
another. He was eighteen years old, and was an idle and dissolute
fellow. Lawrence, the second son, inherited his mother's tack and
energy. He was observing and enterprising, and had already made a
good reputation as a boatman and pilot. He had worked in various
capacities on board of steamers, canal-boats, sloops, and schooners, and
in five years had visited every part of the lake from Whitehall to St.
Johns.
Speaking technically, his bump of locality was large, and he was as
familiar with the navigation of the lake as any pilot on its waters.
Indeed, he had occasionally served as a pilot on board steamers and
other vessels, which had earned for him the name of the Young Pilot,
by which he was often called. But his business was not piloting, for
there was but little of this work to be done. Unlike his father, he was
willing to do anything which would afford him a fair compensation,
and in his five years of active life on the lake he had been a pilot, a
deck-hand, a waiter, and a kitchen assistant on board steamers, and a
sailor, helmsman, and cook on board other craft. He picked up
considerable money, for a boy, by his enterprise, which, like a good son
with a clear apprehension of domestic circumstances, he gave to his
mother. At the time of his introduction to the reader, Lawry had just
piloted a canal-boat, with movable masts, from Whitehall to Plattsburg,
and was working