There were scores, too, who wanted Phil to do them small services in the city. Farmer Blewitt had heard that the car-companies often sold for almost nothing the horses that broke down at their hard work and needed only plenty of rest and pasturage to make them as good as new: wouldn’t Phil look about and see if he couldn’t get him a bargain?--and bring it back oil the sloop, if he wouldn’t mind feeding and watering it on the home trip! Old Mrs. Wholley had been finding her spectacles so young that she didn’t know but she needed stronger glasses, or maybe a Bible with larger print: if Phil would price both and write her, she would try to make up her mind what she ought to do. Samantha Roobles had been telling her husband James for the last five years that their best-room carpet was too shabby for people who might have a funeral in the family at any time, James’s stepmother being very old and sickly, but James wouldn’t do anything but put off, and as for her, she wasn’t going to be cheated out of her eye-teeth at the stores at the dépôt, when year before last she saw in a York newspaper, that the wind blew out of the hand of somebody leaning out of a train window, that good ingrains were selling in New York at thirty-five cents a yard: she wished Phil would pick her out one. Besides many requests like these, Phil had to make promises to dozens of young men and women whose wants were smaller, but none the easier to attend to: so the prospective traveller and his parents had the pains of parting alleviated by the thought that not until Phil departed would any of them have peace. The day of sailing brought a great throng of visitors,--so many that the minister, who was of the number, extemporized a “neighborhood prayer-meeting,” at which Providence was implored to “save our dear young brother from the perils of the deep,” and informed of so many of Phil’s good qualities that only an inborn respect for religious forms restrained the modest youth from sneaking out of the back door and hiding in the hull of the sloop until there was a broad expanse of water between him and the shore. Then the entire throng, excepting two or three old ladies who remained with Mrs. Hayn “to help her bear up, poor soul,” escorted Phil to the sloop. Among them was a predominance of young men who looked as if in case Phil should want a substitute they were ready, and of young women whose faces indicated that if Phil should care to say anything tender to anybody, just to have something to think about while away, he should have no excuse to leave it unsaid. Sol Mantring cut the parting short by remarking that prayer was all very well in its place, but he didn’t believe in it keeping a sloop in a shallow river while the tide was falling and no wind to help her out. So Phil hurried aboard, though not before his father had almost crushed his hand with a grasp that had been developed by many years of training with bridle-reins, axe-helves, and paternal affection.