He continued a faithful labourer to Mr. Barton, attending to the details of the business with promptness, and securing his love and confidence. Barton watched him with pride, and once he said to him:

“Yer kin read, yer kin write, and yer are death on figgers; so stay with me, keep my ’counts, and tend to the saltery. I’ll find yer, and glad to give yer the fourteen dollars a month.”

“I want to be a sailor,” replied James.

“A sailor!” exclaimed Barton, in amazement. “Yer don’t mean it! There’s too much of yer for that business. What’s put that idee into your head?”

“I want to see more of the world than I can see in Ohio,” answered James. “It will be dull business to make black-salts all my days.”

“We’el, yer will never go to sea if yer take my advice. Stay here, and some day yer’ll have a saltery of yer own.”

“I don’t want one,” replied James. “I’d rather have something else.”

“My word for it,” continued Barton; “yer are too good a boy to spile on the seas. Stay with me, and some day yer’ll have a saltery as big as our’n.”

“I wouldn’t spend my life in this business for a dozen salteries as big as this,” replied James.

Barton was exceedingly afraid that he should lose his excellent employé, and so he endeavoured to make his position agreeable as possible. His praise, too, was not stinted at all.

“Yer are a cute boy, good at readin’, good at figgers, good at work, good at everything,” he would say; “stay with me, and I’ll do we’el by yer.”

James continued through the winter, until April opened, when the following incident terminated his career as a salter.

Barton’s daughter had a beau, and he came to see her one night when James was working over some difficult problems in arithmetic. There was but one room below in the farm-house, and that was a very large one, so the young couple occupied a distant corner, James and the “old folks” sitting near the fireplace. James took in the situation well for a boy of his years, and designed to retire as soon as the girl’s father and mother did; but he became so absorbed in his arithmetic that he did not notice they had left the room, until the impatient girl startled him by the remark:

“I should think it was time for hired servants to be abed.”

James’s anger was aroused. He looked at her fiercely for a moment, but said nothing. Then he took his candle and started for his room, his very tread on the floor showing that the invincible spirit within him was thoroughly stirred. The coast was now clear for the matrimonial aspirants, though at quite a loss to the establishment, as the sequel will show.

James could not sleep. The sarcastic girl had knocked sleep out of him.

“Hired servant!” he repeated to himself, over and over. “And that’s all I am in this concern—‘a hired servant,’ I’ll not be a ‘servant’ long, let them know.”

And he tried to compose himself, and forget his trouble by going to sleep, but in vain.

“Hired servant!” It would not down at his bidding. He kept repeating it, in spite of himself; and the more he repeated it, the more his feelings were harrowed.