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So Jem put his prize-money into a new bark, which he found building at Bath; and they called the bark the “Laura,” and Tom and Laura Cutts went to the launching, and Jem superintended the rigging of her himself; and then he took Tom and Laura and the babies with him to New York, and a high time they had together there. Tom saw many of the old army boys, and Laura hunted up one or two old school friends; and they saw Booth in Iago, and screamed themselves hoarse at Niblo’s, and heard Rudolphsen and Johannsen in the German opera; they rode in the Park, and they walked in the Park; they browsed in the Astor and went shopping at Stewart’s, and saw the people paint porcelain at Haighwout’s; and, by Mr. Alden’s kindness, went through the wonders of Harper’s. In short, for three weeks, all of which time they lived on board ship, they saw the lions of New York as children of the public do, for whom that great city decks itself and prepares its wonders, albeit their existence is hardly known to its inhabitants.

Meanwhile Jem had chartered the “Laura” for a voyage to San Francisco. And so, before long, her cargo began to come on board; and she and Tom and the babies took a mournful farewell, and came back to Tripp’s Cove again, to Moses Marvel’s house. And poor Tom thought it looked smaller than ever, and that he should find it harder than ever to settle down to being of no use to anybody, and to eat Moses Marvel’s bread,–without house or barn, or bin or oven, or board or bed, even the meanest, of his own. Poor Tom! and this was the reward of being the first man in Maine to enter for three years!

And then things went worse and worse. Moses Marvel was as good and as taciturn as ever. But Moses Marvel’s affairs did not run as smoothly as he liked. Moses held on, upon one year’s cutting of lumber, perfectly determined that lumber should rise, because it ought to; and Moses paid very high usury on the money he borrowed, because he would hold on. Moses was set in his way,–like other persons whom you and I know,–and to this lumber he held and held, till finally the bank would not renew his notes. No; and they would not discount a cent for him at Bangor, and Moses came back from a long, taciturn journey he had started on in search of money, without any money; and with only the certainty that if he did not mean to have the sheriff sell his lumber, he must sell it for himself. Nay! he must sell it before the fourth of the next month, and for cash; and must sell at the very bottom of a long falling market! Poor Moses Marvel! That operation served to show that he joined all the Cutts want of luck with the Marvel obstinacy. It was a wretched twelvemonth, the whole of it; and it made that household, and made Tom Cutts, more miserable and more.

Then they became anxious about the “Laura,” and Jem. She made almost a clipper voyage to California. She discharged her cargo in perfect order. Jem made a capital charter for Australia and England, and knew that from England it would be easy to get a voyage home. He sailed from California, and then the letters stopped. No! Laura dear, no need in reading every word of the ship-news in the “Semi-weekly Advertiser;” the name of your namesake is not there. Eight, nine, ten months have gone by, and there is no port in Christendom which has seen Jem’s face, or the Laura’s private signal. Do not strain your eyes over the “Semi-weekly” more.

No! dear Laura’s eyes will be dimmed by other cares than the ship-news. Tom’s father, who had shared Tom’s wretchedness, and would gladly have had them at his home, but that Moses Marvel’s was the larger and the less peopled of the two,–Tom’s father was brought home speechless one day, by the men who found him where he had fallen on the road, his yoke of oxen not far away, waiting for the voice which they were never to hear again. Whether he had fallen from the cart, in some lurch it made, and broken his spine, or whether all this distress had brought on of a sudden a stroke of paralysis, so that he lost his consciousness before he fell, I do not know. Nor do I see that it matters much, though the chimney-corners of Tripp’s Cove discuss the question quite eagerly to this hour. He lay there month after month, really unconscious. He smiled gently when they brought him food. He tried to say “Thank you,” they thought, but he did not speak to the wife of his bosom, who had been the Laura Marvel of her day, in any different way from that in which he tried to speak to any stranger of them all. A living death he lay in as those tedious months went by.