The boy fell gratefully into the new
life, passing his days in and about the little counting-room that
looked out on Mr. Faringfield's wharf on the East River. He found it
dull work, the copying of invoices, the writing of letters to
merchants in other parts of the world, the counting of articles of
cargo, and often the bearing a hand in loading or unloading some
schooner or dray; but as beggars should not be choosers, so
beneficiaries should not be complainers, and Philip kept his feelings
to himself.
Mr. Faringfield was an exacting master, whose rule was that his men
should never be idle, even at times when there seemed nothing to do.
If no task was at hand, they should seek one; and if none could be
found, he was like to manufacture one. Thus was Phil denied the
pleasure of brightening or diversifying his day with reading, for
which he could have found time enough. He tried to be interested in
his work, and he in part succeeded, somewhat by good-fellowship with
the jesting, singing, swearing wharfmen and sailors, somewhat by
dwelling often on the thought that he was filling his small place in a
great commerce which touched so distant shores, and so many countries,
of the world. He used to watch the vessels sail, on the few and
far-between days when there were departures, and wish, with inward
sighs, that he might sail with them. A longing to see the great world,
the Europe of history, the Britain of his ancestors, had been
implanted in him by his reading, before he had come to New York, and
the desire was but intensified by his daily contact with the one end
of a trade whose other end lay beyond the ocean.
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