in the tan-yard. People would be slow to trust a clerk who looked a
mere boy. Still, your father trusts me."

"He does, indeed. You need never have any doubt of that. It was
only yesterday he said to me that now he was no longer dissatisfied
with your working at all sorts of studies, in leisure hours, since it
made you none the worse man of business."

"No, I hope not, or I should be much ashamed. It would not be doing
my duty to myself any more than to my master, if I shirked his work
for my own. I am glad he does not complain now, Phineas."

"On the contrary; I think he intends to give you a rise this
Midsummer. But oh!" I cried, recurring to a thought which would
often come when I looked at the lad, though he always combated it so
strongly, that I often owned my prejudices were unjust: "how I wish
you were something better than a clerk in a tan-yard. I have a plan,
John."

But what that plan was, was fated to remain unrevealed. Jael came to
us in the garden, looking very serious. She had been summoned, I
knew, to a long conference with her master the day before--the
subject of which she would not tell me, though she acknowledged it
concerned myself. Ever since she had followed me about, very softly,
for her, and called me more than once, as when I was a child, "my
dear." She now came with half-dolorous, half-angry looks, to summon
me to an interview with my father and Doctor Jessop.

I caught her parting mutterings, as she marched behind me: "Kill or
cure, indeed,"--"No more fit than a baby,"--"Abel Fletcher be clean