Mr. Faringfield was an exacting master, whose rule was that his men should never be idle, even at times when there seemed nothing to do.  If no task was at hand, they should seek one; and if none could be found, he was like to manufacture one.  Thus was Phil denied the pleasure of brightening or diversifying his day with reading, for which he could have found time enough.  He tried to be interested in his work, and he in part succeeded, somewhat by good-fellowship with the jesting, singing, swearing wharfmen and sailors, somewhat by dwelling often on the thought that he was filling his small place in a great commerce which touched so distant shores, and so many countries, of the world.  He used to watch the vessels sail, on the few and far-between days when there were departures, and wish, with inward sighs, that he might sail with them.  A longing to see the great world, the Europe of history, the Britain of his ancestors, had been implanted in him by his reading, before he had come to New York, and the desire was but intensified by his daily contact with the one end of a trade whose other end lay beyond the ocean.

Outside of the hours of business, Philip’s place was that of a member of the Faringfield household, where, save in the one respect that after his first night it was indeed the garret room that fell to him, he was on terms of equality with the children.  Ned alone, of them all, affected toward him the manner of a superior to a dependent.  Whatever were Philip’s feelings regarding this attitude of the elder son, he kept them locked within, and had no more to say to Master Ned than absolute civility required.  With the two girls and little Tom, and with me, he was, evenings and Sundays, the pleasantest playfellow in the world.

Ungrudgingly he gave up to us, once we had made the overtures, the time he would perhaps rather have spent over his books; for he had brought a few of these from Philadelphia, a fact which accounted for the exceeding heaviness of his travelling bag, and he had access, of course, to those on Mr. Faringfield’s shelves.  His compliance with our demands was the more kind, as I afterward began to see, for that his day’s work often left him quite tired out.  Of this we never thought; we were full of the spirits pent up all day at school, Madge and Fanny being then learners at the feet of a Boston maiden lady in our street, while I yawned and idled my hours away on the hard benches of a Dutch schoolmaster near the Broadway, under whom Ned Faringfield also was a student.  But fresh as we were, and tired as Philip was, he was always ready for a romp in our back yard, or a game of hide-and-seek in the Faringfields’ gardens, or a chase all the way over to the Bowling Green, or all the way up to the Common where the town ended and the Bowery lane began.