Page:A Princetonian.djvu/121

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The Young Man with a Purpose.
101

wash in the latticed enclosure behind the house. She remembered the time when she had done just the same thing, a clothes-pin in her mouth, the way the laundry-maid was standing. Her knuckles had itched for the ridges of the scrubbing board, and she had craved cabbage and blue corned beef. Her strong-mindedness, however, had been shown by the way she stood out for "Patrick Corse" (her father's name) against "Clarence Alexander," proposed by her husband. And she had lived just long enough to see the result of her victory, for little Patrick was baptized out of a silver soap-dish in his mother's high-ceilinged room, two days before she died.

After Mr. Heaphy had laid his wife to rest beneath a magnificent pile of assorted granite, he had turned his attention to his only son.—"He should be a gentleman and have all his fancy spoke for."

Thus it might seem that young Patrick's path was to be one of roses; but he would have none of it.

The glass pilot-house affair that topped the mansard roof became stocked with Patrick's cast-off playthings. His greatest pleasure was