To these the boy added, without need of a teacher, the ability to shoot, both with gun and with pistol. I suppose it was from being so much with his mother, between whom and himself there must have existed the most complete devotion, that notwithstanding his manly and scholarly accomplishments, his heart, becoming neither tough like the sportsman's nor dry like the bookworm's, remained as tender as a girl's--or rather as a girl's is commonly supposed to be. His mother's death, due to some inward ailment of which the nature was a problem to the doctors, left him saddened but too young to be embittered. And this was the Philip Winwood--grave and shy from having been deprived too much of the company of other boys, but with certain mental and bodily advantages of which too much of that company would have deprived him--who was taken into the house of the Faringfields in the Summer of 1763. The footing on which he should remain there was settled the very morning after his arrival. Mr. Faringfield, a rigid and prudent man, but never a stingy one, made employment for him as a kind of messenger or under clerk in his warehouse. The boy fell gratefully into the new life, passing his days in and about the little counting-room that looked out on Mr. Faringfield's wharf on the East River. He found it dull work, the copying of invoices, the writing of letters to merchants in other parts of the world, the counting of articles of cargo, and often the bearing a hand in loading or unloading some schooner or dray; but as beggars should not be choosers, so beneficiaries should not be complainers, and Philip kept his feelings to himself. Mr. Faringfield was an exacting master, whose rule was that his men should never be idle, even at times when there seemed nothing to do. If no task was at hand, they should seek one; and if none could be found, he was like to manufacture one. Thus was Phil denied the pleasure of brightening or diversifying his day with reading, for which he could have found time enough. He tried to be interested in his work, and he in part succeeded, somewhat by good-fellowship with the jesting, singing, swearing wharfmen and sailors, somewhat by dwelling often on the thought that he was filling his small place in a great commerce which touched so distant shores, and so many countries, of the world. He used to watch the vessels sail, on the few and far-between days when there were departures, and wish, with inward sighs, that he might sail with them. A longing to see the great world, the Europe of history, the Britain of his ancestors, had been implanted in him by his reading, before he had come to New York, and the desire was but intensified by his daily contact with the one end of a trade whose other end lay beyond the ocean.