Twelve years ago the poor Frenchman and his son had planned this coming to the sea: the boy used to get into his father's bed by dawn to talk it over snugly. It came to be their grand scheme and hope for the future; for neither the father nor little Tom had intellects of a high achieving order. Jacobus had never, I suppose, considered whether his son had genius or not, or what he was to do in the world: to get the boy out of the poisonous city, to see his first look at the ocean, to watch the sturdy little rogue fight the breakers, fish, swim, net for crabs, was about the highest pleasure which the simple old man had ever pictured for them. Now the holiday had come for him; and Tom---- He walked about the room, glancing unsteadily from side to side, as if in search of something lost. The sick, intolerable loneliness of those first days after Tom died came back to him. "_Mon fils! mon fils!_" he muttered once, holding his hand to his side. It gave him actual pain to breathe just then; but his eyes were dry. He never had cried for Tom as his mother did,--never named him to her; she thought he had forgotten. The fancy seized him, that, now that he was here, if Tom cared for him, and for coming there, as he did once, he was not far off at that moment. His sallow jaws colored at the boyish notion, and then he laughed at it,--in a strange saturnine fashion. It was as if another man than the simple Professor suddenly looked out through his eyes,--a man older, more untrustworthy, weak through a life-long doubt,--not his natural self, in a word, but the man which years of life in dirty ways, and the creed which his father gave him, had made of him. He looked out of the window, his fingers knitted behind him. "There is the sea, and I am here, but Tom is not here; he's dust and ashes, yonder in Salem graveyard,--a heap of yellow dust, nothing more,"--a laugh, which the foulest of French skeptics would have envied, crossing his grim face at this fancy of the child's being yet alive and near to him. But the creed having asserted itself thus, the simple face grew suddenly blank, and the gray eyes looked out of their dark hollows as if the world were empty and he alone lived to tell the tale. M. Jacobus had a watchful keeper; she was never far off; she put her hand on his shoulder now with,-- "What do you look for at sea, Jerome?"--speaking cheerfully, and in his own tongue. He did not turn his head until he thought he had put all his trouble out of sight. "I pursue your Captain's fancy," he said. "_I_ find in the sea but muddy water, with power to bring rage and destruction for no cause. I find great treasures lying useless below, starving men sailing above,--great pain, death every day,--the baby washed from its mother's arms, the husband from the wife. The good Captain sees a loving God behind all these: my eyes are not so clear." She pushed the lattice farther open.