He drew up his broad shoulders, and planted on the pavement a firmer
foot, as if he knew he had the world before him--would meet it
single-handed, and without fear.

"What have you worked at lately?"

"Anything I could get, for I have never learned a trade."

"Would you like to learn one?"

He hesitated a minute, as if weighing his speech. "Once I thought I
should like to be what my father was."

"What was he?"

"A scholar and a gentleman."

This was news, though it did not much surprise me. My father, tanner
as he was, and pertinaciously jealous of the dignity of trade, yet
held strongly the common-sense doctrine of the advantages of good
descent; at least, in degree. For since it is a law of nature,
admitting only rare exceptions, that the qualities of the ancestors
should be transmitted to the race--the fact seems patent enough, that
even allowing equal advantages, a gentleman's son has more chances of
growing up a gentleman than the son of a working man. And though he
himself, and his father before him, had both been working men, still,
I think, Abel Fletcher never forgot that we originally came of a good
stock, and that it pleased him to call me, his only son, after one of
our forefathers, not unknown--Phineas Fletcher, who wrote the "Purple
Island."