Poor little Binny Wallace!  How strange it seemed, when I went to school again, to see that empty seat in the fifth row!  How gloomy the playground was, lacking the sunshine of his gentle, sensitive face!  One day a folded sheet slipped from my algebra; it was the last note he ever wrote me.  I couldn’t read it for the tears.

What a pang shot across my heart the afternoon it was whispered through the town that a body had been washed ashore at Grave Point—­the place where we bathed.  We bathed there no more!  How well I remember the funeral, and what a piteous sight it was afterwards to see his familiar name on a small headstone in the Old South Burying Ground!

Poor little Binny Wallace!  Always the same to me.  The rest of us have grown up into hard, worldly men, fighting the fight of life; but you are forever young, and gentle, and pure; a part of my own childhood that time cannot wither; always a little boy, always poor little Binny Wallace!

Chapter Fifteen—­An Old Acquaintance Turns Up

A year had stolen by since the death of Binny Wallace—­a year of which I have nothing important to record.

The loss of our little playmate threw a shadow over our young lives for many and many a month.  The Dolphin rose and fell with the tide at the foot of the slippery steps, unused, the rest of the summer.  At the close of November we hauled her sadly into the boat-house for the winter; but when spring came round we launched the Dolphin again, and often went down to the wharf and looked at her lying in the tangled eel-grass, without much inclination to take a row.  The associations connected with the boat were too painful as yet; but time, which wears the sharp edge from everything, softened this feeling, and one afternoon we brought out the cobwebbed oars.

The ice once broken, brief trips along the wharves—­we seldom cared to go out into the river now—­became one of our chief amusements.  Meanwhile Gypsy was not forgotten.  Every clear morning I was in the saddle before breakfast, and there are few roads or lanes within ten miles of Rivermouth that have not borne the print of her vagrant hoof.

I studied like a good fellow this quarter, carrying off a couple of first prizes.  The Captain expressed his gratification by presenting me with a new silver dollar.  If a dollar in his eyes was smaller than a cart-wheel, it wasn’t so very much smaller.  I redeemed my pencil-case from the treasurer of the Centipedes, and felt that I was getting on in the world.

It was at this time I was greatly cast down by a letter from my father saying that he should be unable to visit Rivermouth until the following year.  With that letter came another to Captain Nutter, which he did not read aloud to the family, as usual.  It was on business, he said, folding it up in his wallet.  He received several of these business letters from time to time, and I noticed that they always made him silent and moody.