experiments in chemistry with him until it was cool enough to ride or row.  In the evening Alexander had his difficult lessons to prepare, and when he tumbled into bed at midnight he was too healthy not to sleep soundly.  He spent two days of every week with his friend Ned Stevens, on a plantation where there were lively people and many horses.  Gradually the heaviness of his grief sank of its weight, the buoyancy and vivacity of his mind were released, the eager sparkle returned to his eyes.  He did not cease to regret his mother, nor passionately to worship her memory; but he was young, the future was an unresting magnet to his ambitious mind, devoted friends did their utmost, and his fine strong brain, eager for novelty and knowledge, opened to new impressions, closed with inherent philosophy to what was beyond recall.  So passed Rachael Levine.

A year later his second trial befell him.  Ned Stevens, the adored, set sail for New York to complete his education at King’s College.  Alexander strained his eyes after the sails of the ship for an hour, then burst unceremoniously into the presence of Hugh Knox.

“Tell me quick,” he exclaimed; “how can I make two thousand pieces of eight?  I must go to college.  Why didn’t my uncles send me with Neddy?  He had no wish to go.  He swore all day yesterday at the prospect of six years of hard work and no more excuses for laziness.  I am wild to go.  Why could it not have been I?”

“That’s a curious way the world has, and you’ll be too big a philosopher in a few years to ask questions like that.  If you want the truth, I’ve wrangled with Peter Lytton,—­it’s no use appealing to Tom Mitchell,—­but he’s a bit close, as you know, when it actually comes to putting his hand in his pocket.  He didn’t send any of his own sons to New York or England, and never could see why anyone else did.  Schooling, of course, and he always had a tutor and a governess out from England; but what the devil does a planter want of a college education?  I argued that I couldn’t for the life of me see the makings of a planter in you, but that by fishing industriously among your intellects I’d found a certain amount of respectable talent, and I thought it needed more training than I could give it; that I was nearing the end of my rope, in fact.  Then he asked me what a little fellow like you would do with a college education after you got it, for he couldn’t stand the idea of you trying to earn your living in a foreign city, where there was ice and snow on the ground in winter; and when I suggested that you might stay on in the college and teach, if you were afraid of being run over or frozen to death in the street, he said there was no choice between a miserable teacher’s life and a planter’s, and he’d leave you enough land to start you in life.  I cursed like a planter, and left the house.  But he loves you, and if you plead with him he might give way.”

“I’d do anything else under heaven that was reasonable to get to New York but ask any man for money.  Peter Lytton knows that I want learning more than all the other boys on this island; and if I’m little, I’ve broken in most of his colts and have never hesitated to fight.  He finds his pathos in his purse.  Why can’t I make two thousand pieces of eight?”