THE COMMANDER OF THE EXPEDITION. 3 



De Long. A blow on the ear caused an injury which 

 required two or thre.e months' detention in the house 

 under the doctor's care, and in this enforced leisure the 

 boy and his mother discussed his future career. She 

 gave him the choice of being a doctor, a priest, or a 

 lawyer, and of the three professions that of doctor 

 seemed to open the largest promise of activity. At any 

 rate, when the boy had recovered he proposed to find 

 out something about the life before he prepared for it, 

 and so engaged himself with his friend who had been 

 treating him, and stayed with him several months. 



A familiarity with the outside of a doctor's life and 

 an attendance upon a few painful operations satisfied 

 George De Long that he had no aptitude for this pro- 

 fession, and he found little difficulty in bringing his 

 mother to his way of thinking, when he unfolded to 

 her the incessant risks which a doctor ran of contract- 

 ing a great variety of contagious diseases. The next 

 profession was that of divinity, and his mother was 

 urgent that he should study for orders; but without 

 going through any preliminary experimenting with the 

 life of a priest, the boy resorted to the argument which 

 had already served him well, and drew such a picture 

 of the privations and hardships of a priest's life, and 

 the dangers to which he was exposed in his contact 

 with the sick and the dying, that he succeeded in dim- 

 ming for his mother the brighter spectacle of a possible 

 cardinal, and in securing a reprieve for himself. 



The arguments which he employed were the inge- 

 nuities by which he persuaded his mother ; they were 

 not the convictions which moved him. He had a reso- 

 lute, courageous spirit, which impelled him to a life of 

 free activity; but he had also the fine spirit of obe- 

 dience and loyalty, which forbade him to break away 



