He was a thrifty
Yankee, and with a Yankee's sense of justice; so he offered me a fair
proportion of the profits. But at the end of the year he told me that
he thought I was "too much of a Virginian" ever to follow this
occupation, and that, having seen my father and known his position, he
was surprised that he had ever favored such a pursuit for me. This
was, indeed, the falsehood I had told him.
It was in a Canadian village that I parted with this gentlemanly and
generous New-Englander. When I left him, I was not penniless, but a
bitter sense of my loneliness was upon me, and a consciousness of the
uncandid and cruel turn I had done my father brought me almost to the
verge of suicide. On Sunday morning I entered a church in Toronto, and
tears flowed down my face as I heard the minister read the parable of
the Prodigal Son. It seemed to me as a voice from home, and I
determined to go to my father. Without hesitating, or stopping an
hour, I took all the money I had to pay my way, and in about six days
afterward, sitting beside the driver on the stage-coach, looked from a
hill upon the house in which I was born. A pang shot through my heart
at that instant. Until that moment I had dreamed of my father's
seeing me whilst I was yet a great way off, of resting my weary head
upon his warm, infolding heart.
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