into the Promised Land of manhood, but the brimming cup of college work and play quaffed in health-giving heartiness is the elixir of youth.  The speculative habit of the boy slept in the college undergraduate.  The days were full, each of the things of itself, and if Tom looked forward to the workaday future,—­as he did by times,—­the boyish impatience to be at it was gone.  Chiawassee Consolidated was moderately prosperous; the home letters were mere chronicles of sleepy Paradise.  The skies were clear, and the present was acutely present.  Tom studied hard and played hard; ate like an ogre and slept like a log.  And when he finally awoke to find himself stumbling bewildered on the bank of the epoch-marking Rubicon, he was over and across before he could realize how so narrow a stream should fill so vast a chasm.

The call of the ferryman—­to keep the figure whole—­was a letter from his father, a letter longer than the commonplace chronicles, and painfully written with the mechanic hand on both sides of a company letter-head.  Caleb Gordon wrote chiefly of business.  Mutterings of the storm of financial depression were already in the air.  Iron, more sensitive than the stock-market, was the barometer, and its readings in the Southern field were growing portentous.  Within the month several of the smaller furnaces had gone out of blast, and Chiawassee Consolidated, though still presenting a fair exterior, was, Caleb feared, rotten at heart.  What would Tom advise?

Tom found this letter in his mail-box one evening after a strenuous day in the laboratory; and that night he sat up with the corpse of his later boyhood, though he was far enough from putting it that way.  His father was in trouble, and the letter was a call for help.  It seemed vastly incredible.  Thomas Jefferson’s ideal of steady courage, of invincible human puissance, was formed on the model of the stout-hearted old soldier who had fought under Stonewall Jackson.  What a trumpet blast of alarm must have sounded to make such a man turn to a raw recruit for help!

Suddenly Tom began to realize that he was no longer a raw recruit, a boy to ride care-free while men were afoot and fighting.  It astounded him that the realization had been so slow in arriving.  It was as if he had been led blindfolded to the firing line, there to have the bandage plucked from his eyes by an unseen hand.  Tumultuously it rushed on him that he was weaponed as the men of his father’s generation could not be; that his hand could be steady and his heart fearless under threatenings that might well shake the courage of the old man who had borne only the burden and the heat of the day of smaller things.

He sat long with his elbows on the study table and his chin resting on his hands.  The room was small but the walls gave before the steady gaze of the gray eyes, and Tom saw afar; down a vistaed highway wherein a strong man walked, leading a boy by the hand.  Swiftly, with a click like that of the mechanism in a kinetoscope, the scene changed.  The highway was the same, but now the man’s steps had grown cautious and uncertain and he was groping for the shoulder of the boy, as for a leaning-staff.