Persons who ask me to allow motives of this awfully important nature to be modified in the smallest degree by any considerations connected with the lad's natural disposition (which has been a source of grief to me from his childhood) with his bodily gifts of the flesh (which have hitherto only served to keep him from the cultivation of the gifts of the spirit); or with his own desires (which I know by bitter experience to be all of the world, worldly);--persons, I say, who ask me to do any of these things, ask me also to act from a godless principle of expediency, and to violate moral rectitude by impiously compounding with vice." Acting on such principles of parental discipline as these, Mr.Thorpe conscientiously believed that he had done his duty, when he had at last forced his son into the merchant's office.

He had, in truth, perpetrated one of the most serious mistakes which it is possible for a wrong-headed father to commit.

For once, Zack had not exaggerated in saying that his aversion to employment in a counting-house amounted to absolute horror.
His physical peculiarities, and the habits which they had entailed on him from boyhood, made life in the open air, and the constant use of his hardy thews and sinews a constitutional necessity.

He felt--and there was no self-delusion in the feeling--that he should mope and pine, like a wild animal in a cage, under confinement in an office, only varied from morning to evening by commercial walking expeditions of a miserable mile or two in close and crowded streets.

These forebodings--to say nothing of his natural yearning towards adventure, change of scene, and exhilarating bodily exertion--would have been sufficient of themselves to have decided him to leave his home, and battle his way through the world (he cared not where or how, so long as he battled it freely), but for one consideration.