Tempest Tost

“No,” said Hector. “I’m not going to be pushed into the ministry. I’ve no mind for it at all.”

“Are you refusing to pray with your mother and me?”

“Yes,” said Hector loudly, and the dark flush spread over his face. Mr McKi

“It’s a mercy your father didn’t live to see this day,” she quavered. “It was his dearest wish that you should follow him in The Work.”

“I never heard him say so,” said Hector. Because he was young and fighting for his life, he gave u

The Reverend Mr McKi

“You never knew my father,” said Hector. “I don’t think anything was easy for him. And I’m telling you now that I will not be a minister. I’ll have to live my own life and make my own way, and it will not be in the church. I told you I’d made up my mind.”

“Have you no consideration whatever for your mother?”

“Yes. I’m going to support her. It is my duty, and I’ll do it. But I’ll do it as a schoolteacher.”

“I see that it is a waste of time to argue with you while you are in this frame of mind,” said Mr McKi

He left the room, and went to his bedroom, where he sat uncomfortably on the edge of his bed and thought the thoughts of a man who is not master in his own manse, and who has been worsted by a boy of seventeen.

Hector, left alone with his mother, made no attempt to comfort her. He sat for ten minutes, during which she cried softly and persistently. Then he went to her chair and put his hand on her shoulder.

“It’s no good to cry any more, mother,” said he. “You could have saved yourself all this if you had listened when I said I’d made up my mind. Now don’t worry; I’ll look after you and it’ll all come out right. I’ve pla

No more was said on the matter until the end of June, when it appeared that Hector had matriculated with honours, and he made application for a year’s training at the nearest Normal School, which was thirty miles from the village in which he had grown up.

In the autumn Hector went to the Normal School, to be trained as a teacher. He had never been away from home before but he felt no uneasiness about his situation. He had five hundred dollars, all of which he had earned himself; he had a suit for every day, which he had ordered from Eaton’s catalogue; he had a best suit which the Reverend James McKi

When he left home no one would have thought that his mother had ever had any ambition for him save a teacher’s life. She had an ability, invaluable in a weak person, to persuade herself that whatever was inevitable had her full approval, and was in some measure her own doing. She was eager to further his plan in any way open to her.

Hector did not want money from his mother, and he did not want her to make sacrifices for him. He felt perfectly confident that he could look after himself, and her too, as soon as his year of training was over. In the years when many boys show an indecisive and unrealistic attitude toward life, Hector had grown unusually calculating and capable. The village said that he was long-headed. He had been able to detach himself from his home atmosphere enough to see that what lay at the root of many of his father’s misfortunes was a lack of foresight, of pla

He was too much a minister’s son to be without a god in some other world, and he was lucky enough to find the god which suited him in mathematics, represented in his schooling by algebra and geometry. In these studies, it seemed to him, pla

Normal school yielded, almost without a hitch, to Hector’s system. He was quickly singled out by the teachers as a student of unusual ability. These teachers, it must be explained, were not so much engaged in teaching, as in teaching how to teach. It was their task to impart to the young men and women in their care the latest and most infallible method of cramming information into the heads of children. Recognizing that few teachers have that burning enthusiasm which makes a method of instruction u