He could see his mother, too, sitting by the window, looking out upon the trees. He knew where her thoughts lay. As his mind rested on her pale face his eyes filled with tears. "Dear old mother," he said to himself--"I am not forgetting, dear. I am holding on. But oh, if I had only got the place to-day, how happy you would be to-morrow." A bitter feeling had risen in his heart, when he had opened the letter which had brought him the news of the loss of this hoped-for situation. "This is making one's way in the world, is it?" he had said to himself with a heavy sigh. Then the calm eyes of his mother had looked into his again, and he had felt the pressure of the soft hand and heard the tones of her voice: "You may have many discouragements, my son, and will often be ready to faint by the way, but stick to it and you will win." His bitterness had been but momentary, and he had soon pulled himself together, but his every resource seemed exhausted now. He had counted so on the situation--that of a shipping-clerk in a dry-goods store--promised him because of a letter that he carried from Amos Cobb's friend. But at the last moment the former clerk, who had been laid off because of sickness, had been taken back, and so the weary search for work must begin again. And yet with everything against him Oliver had no thought of giving up the struggle. Even Amos Cobb would have been proud of him could he have seen the dogged tenacity with which he clung to his purpose--a tenacity due to his buoyant, happy temperament, or to his devotion to his mother's wishes; or (and this is more than probable) to some drops of blood, perhaps, that had reached his own through his mother's veins--the blood of that Major with the blue and buff coat, whose portrait hung in the dining-room at home, and who in the early days had braved the flood at Trenton side by side with the Hero of the Bronze Horse now overlooking the bench on which Oliver sat; or it may be of that other ancestor in the queue whose portrait hung over the mantel of the club and who had served his State with distinction in his day.