So it was arranged. I shouldn't say anything, but keep out of father's way until she made him yield the point. She laid it out to the old gentleman clear and straight, Mattie tells me--(Mattie's mother was my mother's half-sister)--telling him I wasn't drunk, as he could readily prove, and as for the fighting, if he intended to beat me every time I defended a woman, why, she'd leave, too. That part of it stuck in mother's mind; she would not listen when I told her it was only one of the reasons for the row. And she summed the thing up by saying I was determined to leave; that it was best all around; and that he must act like a human being and a father for once. By this time, I reckon he didn't feel so terrible proud of himself. At least, it was pulled off easy. I left home, with some small money in my pocket, a trunk of clothes in Eli's care, and mother and father both waving me good-by in the road, for the Great World, per Boston, and a schooner trading South, that belonged to Eli's cousin. [Illustration: "I left home ... mother and father both waving me good-by in the road"] And here's a queer thing. The day I left, Mick went into the tavern and called for a glass of whisky. He poured out a snorter and balanced it on the flat of his thumb. "Ladies and gintlemen," says he, "ye here behold th' koind friend that led Mick Murphy--that's licked the country--to bang a bit of a bye, after misnamin' a dacent woman." Smash! goes the glass on the floor. "Tra-la-loo to you!" says Mick, flinging the barkeep' a half-dollar. "Keep the change," he says. "It's the last cent I have, and the last you'll get from me." And that's just what happened, too. He's located about twenty mile over yonder, with a good factory and somewheres between ninety and nine thousand Murphys claiming him as their start. And my best friend is old Mick. He cried when I first went to see him. I reformed him, but it cost me my home. I never knew, either, till he told me himself, a year ago. VI "I'M MARY SMITH" Plunk, plunk, plunketty-plunk, down the pike, me and Eli, and Dandy Jim, Eli's black horse. I'll never tell you how I felt. It was the first I'd ever been away from home. All the regrets I had was eased by knowing it wouldn't be more than six months before I'd come back with a gunny-sack full of hundred-dollar bills, buy Mr. Jasper's place with the pillars in front, and a railroad, and pervade things in general with a tone of pink and birds singing. One thing about being a boy is that you're sure of to-morrow, anyhow. Well, we slid along behind a free-gaited horse, in an easy wagon, over good roads, in early New England summer, when every breath of air had a pretty story to tell. If it hadn't been for the tight vest I had on, I reckon my heart would have bust my ribs for joyfulness.