At this juncture came the brutal and as I felt most unmerited flogging of which I have told the story earlier:  this precipitated a decision which had been slowly forming from my conscientious worries.  I determined to go away from home, and seek a state of life in which I could maintain my spiritual tranquillity.  I discussed the subject with a playmate of my age, the son of a gardener living near us, and, as his father had even a stronger propensity to the rod than mine, we sympathized on that ground and agreed to run away and work our passages on some ship to a land where we could live in a modified Robinson Crusoe manner,—­not an uninhabited land, but one where we could earn, by fishing and similar devices, enough to live.  I had been employed for a few months before in carrying to and fro the students’ clothes for a washerwoman, one of the neighbors, and had earned three or four dollars which my mother had, as usual with any trifle I earned, put into the fund for the daily expenses.  I do not know how it was with the older boys, but for me the rule was rigid—­what I could earn was a part of the household income.  I inwardly rebelled against this, but to no effect, so I never had any pocket-money.  I submitted, as any son of my mother would have done at my age or have given a solid reason why not; but on this occasion, when money was indispensable to that expedition on which so much depended, I quietly reasserted my right to my earnings, and took the wages I had received, from the drawer where they were kept.  My companion had no money at all, and thus my trifle had to pay for both as far as it would go,—­fortunately, perhaps, as it shortened the duration of the expedition.

We went by train to Albany, where we took deck passage on a towing steamer for New York.  The run was longer than that of a passenger steamer, so that the New York police who were warned to look out for us by the post, had given us up when we arrived and search was diverted in another direction.  We arrived at New York with my funds already nearly exhausted by the food expenses en route, and my companion’s courage had already given out—­he was homesick and discouraged, and announced his determination to return home.  My own courage, I can honestly say, had not failed me,—­I was ready for hardship, but to go alone into a strange world damped my ascetic ardor and confounded all the plans I had made.  I yielded, and with the last few “York shillings"[1] in my pocket bargained for a deck passage without board on a barge back to Albany.  It was midsummer, and the sleeping on some bags of wool which formed the better part of the deck-load gave me no inconvenience, and the want of provisions of any sort was remedied as well as might be by a pile of salt codfish which was the other part of the deck-load, and which was the only food we had until our arrival at Albany, which we reached at night after a voyage of twenty-four hours.  We slept under a boat overturned by the