“You’d be so long at it, poor child, that it would be too late to enter college; for there’s a long apprenticeship to serve before you get a salary.  But you must go.  I’ve thought, thought about it, and I’ll think more.”  He almost wished he had not married; but as he had no other cause to regret his venture, even his interest in young Hamilton did not urge him to deprive his little family of the luxuries so necessary in the West Indies.  Economy on his salary would mean a small house instead of large rooms where one could forget the heat; curtailment of the voluminous linen wardrobes so soon demolished on the stones of the river; surrender of coach and horses.  He trusted to a moment of sudden insight on the part of Peter Lytton, assisted by his own eloquent argument; and his belief in Alexander’s destiny never wavered.  Once he approached Mrs. Mitchell, for he knew she had money of her own; but, as he had expected, she went into immediate hysterics at the suggestion to part with her idol, and he hastily retreated.

Alexander turned over every scheme of making money his fertile brain conceived, and went so far as to ask his aunt to send him to New York, where he could work in one of the West Indian houses, and attend college by some special arrangement.  He, too, retreated before Mrs. Mitchell’s agitation, but during the summer another cause drove him to work, and without immediate reference to the wider education.

Mr. Mitchell was laid up with the gout and spent the summer on his plantation.  His slaves fled at the sound of his voice, his wife wept incessantly at this the heaviest of her life’s trials, and it was not long before Alexander was made to feel his dependence so keenly by the irascible planter that he leaped on his horse one day and galloped five miles under the hot sun to Lytton’s Fancy.

“I want to work,” he announced, with his usual breathless impetuosity when excited, bursting in upon Mr. Lytton, who was mopping his face after his siesta.  “Put me at anything.  I don’t care what, except in Uncle Mitchell’s store.  I won’t work for him.”

Mr. Lytton laughed with some satisfaction.  “So you two have come to loggerheads?  Tom Mitchell, well, is insufferable.  With gout in him he must bristle with every damnable trait in the human category.  Come back and live with me,” he added, in a sudden burst of sympathy, for the boy looked hot and tired and dejected; and his diminutive size appealed always to Peter Lytton, who was six feet two.  “You’re a fine little chap, but I doubt you’re strong enough for hard work, and you love your books.  Come here and read all day if you like.  When you’re grown I’ll make you manager of all my estates.  Gad!  I’d be glad of an honest one!  The last time I went to England, that devil, Tom Collins, drank every bottle of my best port, smashed my furniture, broke the wind of every horse I had, and kept open house for every scamp and loafer on the Island, or that came to port.  How old are you—­twelve?  I’ll turn everything over to you in three years.  You’ve more sense now than any boy I ever saw.  Three years hence, if you continue to improve, you’ll be a man, and I’ll be only too glad to put the whole thing in your hands.”