“Yes; he stopped and caught hold of my hand, saying, ’God bless you, Jenny!  We may never meet again.  They have driven me away, because they thought I meant to harm you.’  But he said nothing wrong was in his heart, and asked me to pray for him, as he would need my prayers.”

At this part of her narrative, Jenny wept bitterly, and her auditor’s eyes became dim also.

Satisfied that Jenny’s story was true in every particular, Mr.
Lofton spoke kindly to her and sent her home.

A week after Mark Clifford left Fairview, word came that he had enlisted in the United States’ service and gone to sea as a common sailor; accompanying this intelligence was an indignant avowal of his father that he would have nothing more to do with him.  To old Mr. Lofton this was a serious blow.  In Mark he had hoped to see realized some of his ambitious desires.  His daughter Jenny had been happy in her marriage, but the union never gave him much satisfaction.  She was to have been the wife of one more distinguished than a mere plodding money-making merchant.

Painful was the shock that accompanied the prostration of old Mr. Lofton’s ambitious hopes touching his grandson, of whom he had always been exceedingly fond.  To him he had intended leaving the bulk of his property when he died.  But now anger and resentment arose in his mind against him as unworthy such a preference, and in the warmth of a moment’s impulse, he corrected his will and cut him off with a dollar.  This was no sooner done than better emotions stirred in the old man’s bosom, and he regretted the hasty act; but pride of consistency prevented his recalling it.

From that time old Mr. Lofton broke down rapidly.  In six months he seemed to have added ten years to his life.  During that period no news had come from Mark; who was not only angry with both his father and grandfather, but felt that in doing what he had done, he had offended them beyond the hope of forgiveness.  He, therefore, having taken a rash step, moved on in the way he had chosen, in a spirit of recklessness and defiance.  The ties of blood which had bound him to his home were broken; the world was all before him, and he must make his way in it alone.  The life of a common sailor in a government ship he found to be something different from what he had imagined, when, acting under a momentary excitement, he was so mad as to enlist in the service.  Unused to work or ready obedience, he soon discovered that his life was to be one not only of bodily toil, pushed sometimes to the extreme of fatigue, but one of the most perfect subordination to the will of others, under pain of corporeal punishment.  The first insolent word of authority passed to him by a new fledged midshipman, his junior by at least three years, stung him so deeply that it was only by a most violent effort that he could master the impulse that prompted him to seize and throw him overboard.  He did not regret this successful effort at self-control, when, a few hours afterwards, he was compelled to witness the punishment of the cat inflicted on a sailor for the offence of insolence to an officer.  The sight of the poor man, writhing under tile brutality of the lash, made an impression on him that nothing could efface.  It absorbed his mind and brought it into a healthier state of reflection than it had yet been.