“It is as though I listened to Satan!” exclaims the dismayed doctor, fidgeting with his ruffles.
“And if it were indeed Satan!” goes on the youth, with a gleam of sarcasm, “I have heard you characterize that arch demon from your pulpit, and even you, while making him malicious, never made him mean. But to get on with this picture of myself, which I show you as preliminary to laying bare a resolution. As I say, I have no sympathies, no hopes which go beyond myself. I think on this world, not the next; I believe only in the gospel according to Philip Dormer Stanhope--that Lord Chesterfield, whom, with the help of Dr. Johnson, you so much succeed in despising.”
“To talk thus at nineteen!” whispers the doctor, his face ghastly.
“Nineteen, truly! But you must reflect that I have not had, since I may remember, the care of either father or mother, which is an upbringing to rapidly age one.”
“Were you not carefully reared by your kind Uncle Timothy?” This indignantly.
“Indeed, sir, I was, as you say, well reared in that dull town of Elizabeth, which for goodness and dullness may compare with your Bethlehem here. It was a rearing, too, from which--as I think my kind Uncle Timothy has informed you--I fled.”
“He did! He said you played truant twice, once running away to sea.”
“It was no great voyage, then!” The imperturbable youth, hard of eye, soft of voice, smiles cynically. “No, I was cabin boy two days, during all of which the ship lay tied bow and stern to her New York wharf. However, that is of no consequence as part of what we now consider.”
“No!” interrupts the doctor miserably, “only so far as it displays the young workings of your sinfully rebellious nature. As a child, too, you mocked your elders, as you do now. Later, as a student, you were the horror of Princeton.”
“All that, sir, I confess; and yet I say that it is of the past. I hold it time lost to think on aught save the present or the future.”
“Think, then, on your soul’s future!--your soul’s eternal future!”
“I shall think on what lies this side of the grave. I shall devote my faculties to this world; which, from what I have seen, is more than likely to keep me handsomely engaged. The next world is a bridge, the crossing of which I reserve until I come to it.”