the United States of America, and Europe, Asia, and Africa; but it may be doubted if all the affairs of all these continents produced as much sensation among the girls in the singers’ seat that day as did the news that James Pitkin had gone to sea on a four years’ voyage.  Curious eyes were cast on Diana Pitkin, and many were the whispers and speculations as to the part she might have had in the move; and certainly she looked paler and graver than usual, and some thought they could detect traces of tears on her cheeks.  Some noticed in the tones of her voice that day, as they rose in the soprano, a tremor and pathos never remarked before—­the unconscious utterance of a new sense of sorrow, awakened in a soul that up to this time had never known a grief.

For the letter had fallen on the heads of the Pitkin household like a thunderbolt.  Biah came in to breakfast and gave it to Mrs. Pitkin, saying that James had handed him that last night, on his way over to take the midnight stage to Salem, where he was going to sail on the Eastern Star to-day—­no doubt he’s off to sea by this time.  A confused sound of exclamations went up around the table, while Mrs. Pitkin, pale and calm, read the letter and then passed it to her husband without a word.  The bright, fixed color in Diana’s face had meanwhile been slowly ebbing away, till, with cheeks and lips pale as ashes, she hastily rose and left the table and went to her room.  A strange, new, terrible pain—­a sensation like being choked or smothered—­a rush of mixed emotions—­a fearful sense of some inexorable, unalterable crisis having come of her girlish folly—­overwhelmed her.  Again she remembered the deep tones of his good-by, and how she had only mocked at his emotion.  She sat down and leaned her head on her hands in a tearless, confused sorrow.

Deacon’ Pitkin was at first more shocked and overwhelmed than his wife.  His yesterday’s talk with James had no such serious purpose.  It had been only the escape-valve for his hypochondriac forebodings of the future, and nothing was farther from his thoughts than having it bear fruit in any such decisive movement on the part of his son.  In fact, he secretly was proud of his talents and his scholarship, and had set his heart on his going through college, and had no more serious purpose in what he said the day before than the general one of making his son feel the difficulties and straits he was put to for him.  Young men were tempted at college to be too expensive, he thought, and to forget what it cost their parents at home.  In short, the whole thing had been merely the passing off of a paroxysm of hypochondria, and he had already begun to be satisfied that he should raise his interest money that year without material difficulty.  The letter showed him too keenly the depth of the suffering he had inflicted on his son, and when he had read it he cast a sort of helpless, questioning look on his wife, and said, after an interval of silence: