The Bondage of Ballinger | Page 4

up to the present problem, and hinted with delicate irony that if he had any preference in the way of a vocation it would simplify matters amazingly to mention it. Young Thomas replied with much sincerity of feeling. He admitted his shortcomings with winning candor and freely attested the efforts that had been made in his behalf. He confessed that a studious life in his quiet home was very much to his taste, and that he could live on indefinitely without desiring to change it, but since that was impossible under existing conditions, and since it had been declared necessary that he should take up the burdens of human existence, he believed that the lot of a printer would present the fewest serious obstacles. Whereupon the father, overjoyed by any suggestion, and dazzled by this ray of encouragement, sent him off to Boston to the printing-shop of an old friend.
The unexpected happened when Tom took handily to his trade, and in a short time won the praise of his master, who had accepted him with misgivings through the rumors of early experiences and failures, for it seemed to the youth that there was a close, even holy, association of his books with the types he fingered so deftly, and with every thousand ems he would think, not of the commercial rate of wages, but of the time when perhaps a whole book might be set up by his hand, a book that he might love and cherish and point to as, in a way, his contribution to lasting literature. Of these things he ventured at times to speak to the old printer, and that sagacious task-master humored his fancy, and beguiled him with airy tales of the tremendous possibilities of his art, so that Tom was spurred on to work the more diligently and to study the forms and devices of printing more closely. However, as his earnings went systematically toward the purchase of more books, and as he was consequently in arrears in the disposition of numerous bills for food, clothes, and other luxuries, demanded even by incipient bibliomania, his family and village friends continued to shake their heads ominously and reaffirm their former fears.
It is the generous dispensation of Providence that, whatever our failings, and however we may grieve and disappoint those who are near to us and who are ambitious for our welfare and success, there is always one who believes in us, whose faith endures through all trials, and whose confidence is preserved in every series of disasters. And this reservation certainly could not fail when a handsome young fellow is the illustration in point, and when memories of chivalrous gentleness are constantly arising to combat the tongues of prejudice. In the early school-days, in the crab-apple time of youth, a little girl had peeped shyly at Torn from the benches just across the aisle a little girl in a gray pinafore and white apron, a grave little girl with big eyes and pink cheeks and a funny little nose, and with two severe braids of chestnut hair hanging stiffly down her back. And when the boys tormented her, as boys will, and laughed at the garb of her faith, and at her "thee" and "thou," Tom was her champion and defender. The chivalry that was in the boy was perhaps increased by the stories his father had told and read to him, and whenever he bore down to rescue the little maid from her tormentors, he fancied that she was a princess in distress and he her sworn knight. He would be Launcelot or Roland or Ivanhoe, as his humor directed, and he constructed a wonderful cave to which he carried her after a royal battle, although she knew nothing either of his conceit or of his names, and only looked gratefully and wonderingly at him with her big eyes, and believed him to be the most valiant and the most remarkable of all small boys. When they went home together in the sunlight of the aftenioon, they raced down the long lane that led from the school-house, and stopped to watch the shiners in the brook or hunt for luck emblems in the clover patch. And as the years went by, and the little girl's skirts grew longer, as her hair apparently grew shorter, while the ridiculous small nose began to assume the proportions intended by nature, the tint deepened in her cheeks when Tom's name was mentioned, and her childish fancy was more than ever her hero and ideal.
If Tom came home at Thanksgiving, or during the Christmas holidays, or for an occasional Sunday, he divided his time impartially between the little cottage at the top of the hill and Ephraim Playf air's more pretentious home in the outskirts of the village. And