Then the family was large.  There was old Mr. Lane, his wife, their five grown-up boys, Emily, the sick one, and Miss Joey.  The eldest son went out to China, and there died.  The next three, at different times, started for California.  Two died of the fever, and the third was supposed to have been murdered in crossing the Plains.

David remained.  He was a tall, well-made youth, with plenty of health and good looks, willing to work on the farm, but devoted mainly to his little sloop-boat.  People called him odd.  He was both odd and even.  He was odd in being somewhat different in his habits from other young men; but then he had an even way of his own, which he kept.  With him, the sea and his little sloop-boat and the daily paper supplied the place of balls, concerts, parties, and young women.

“Why don’t you dress up, and go gallivantin’ about ’mong the gals?” his old mother used to say.  But he would only laugh, and pshaw, and walk off to the shore.  And I, watching his erect gait and firm tread, would wonder how it was that one good-looking young man should be so different from all other good-looking young men.  Still, there was a sort of sheepishness about the eyes, and that was probably why he never turned them, when meeting the girls, but strode along, looking straight ahead, as if they had been so many fence-posts.

Fanny J——­ once laid a wager with me that she would make him bow.  She contrived a plan to meet him as he returned from the Square.  I hid behind the stone wall, and peeped through the chinks.  Just as they met, she almost let the wind blow her bonnet off, hoping to catch his eye.  But he looked so straight forward into the distance that I was alarmed, thinking there might be a loose horse coming, or a house afire.  That was in the first of my staying there.  We were afterwards great friends.  He liked me, because I was good to the old folks, and to Emily,—­and had a sort of respect for me, because I was the oldest, and because I could talk, and because of the great thick books in my room.  I respected him, because I had seen the world and its shams, and knew him to be good all the way through, and because he couldn’t talk, and also, perhaps, because he was so much bigger and handsomer than I. In fact, I should have felt quite downhearted about my own looks, if I hadn’t learned from books—­not the thick ones—­that sallow-looking men, with dark eyes, are interesting.

David’s mother approved of steady habits, but for all that she would rather have had him waste some of his time, and be like the rest of his kind.

“Poor David!” she would say, sometimes, “if anybody could only make him think he was somebody, he’d be somebody.  But he ’a’n’t got no confidence.”

“Mother,” I would answer, “don’t worry about David.  He’s good, and goodness is as good as anything.”

She liked to have me call her mother.  I had been there so long that I almost filled the place of one of her lost ones.  Besides, I had no mother of my own, and no real home.