It is a fearful thing to have lying on one's heart in this life the consciousness that one has been ever so innocently the occasion, if not the cause, of a fellow-creature's turning aside into the path which was destined to take him to his death.
The very next day after Billy Jacobs's funeral, his widow left the house.
She sold all the furniture, except what was absolutely necessary for a very meagre outfitting of the little cottage into which she moved.

The miserly habit of her husband seemed to have suddenly fallen on her like a mantle.

Her life shrank and dwindled in every possible way; she almost starved herself and her boy, although the rent of her old homestead was quite enough to make them comfortable.

In a few years, to complete the poor woman's misery, her son ran away and went to sea.

The sea-farer's stories which his Uncle John had told him, when he was a little child, had never left his mind; and the drearier his mother made life for him on land, the more longingly he dwelt on his fancies of life at sea, till at last, when he was only fifteen, he disappeared one day, leaving a note, not for his mother, but for his Sunday-school teacher,--the only human being he loved.