It must be confessed that Aunt Fanny went down stairs a little relieved
in mind after this talk with Belle. Here was one, at least, of her little
charges, who would be worth her weight in the new home to which they
were to be transferred. As the boys came in from school, she had another
such lesson. She asked Nahum who would be a good man to whom to send her
trunk, which needed some repair. The boy gave her his views, and then
asked what she wanted to have done. Aunt Fanny explained that in coming
on she had, wisely or not, left the dress tray of her trunk at home. In
going back she was sure she would need a tray, and she must have a new
one made.
“Is that all?” said Nahum. “I should never send to Sage’s for that.”
“What would you do?” asked Aunt Fanny.
“I should make the tray myself,” said Nahum, quite unconsciously. “When
Belle made her famous visit to Swampscott, she found that that trunk
she has now would not take in some dandy-jack hat she wanted to carry.
And I made a new tray for her.” So he brought his aunt to the “trunk
closet,” dragged out Belle’s trunk, and showed her a neat tray, made of
white-wood, and very perfectly fitted. “Is that good enough?” asked the
boy.
Of course it was good enough, and Aunt Fanny explained that she had not
known that Nahum was fond of tools.
“Oh, I might have been as fond of tools as of candy,” said Nahum. “But
that would not have come out for much. I learned to handle tools at
school.”
“School!” said Aunt Fanny.
“Yes, they wanted to try it at the Dwight, where I was. So they got some
benches put into the Ward Room, which is in their building, and is only
used by the voters twice a year. They had a first rate teacher, Mr.
Batchelder. We had one lesson a week. They would not let us go on unless
we kept up in the regular school lessons. So it made the fellows spur up,
I tell you, because we all liked the shop, though that was extra.”
“How many lessons have you had?” said Aunt Fanny.
“Oh, I was in the first class, and so I had only one year’s course. It
was eighteen lessons. The first day we tried to strike square blows with
the hammer. Some of us did not strike very square, I tell you. All the
beginning with nails came the first day. The last lesson was ‘planing and
squaring, marking, making tenon, making mortise, and fastening mortise
and tenon.’ I wrote a letter to another fellow, and I copied it from the
school regulations.”
So Nahum went out to his own work shop in the shed, which, as it
happened, Aunt Fanny had never seen before, because Nahum kept it under
his own key. In the afternoon the tray was made.
“This will make you no end of comfort in Wisconsin, Nahum.”
“But if I am to do carpenter work, really,” said the boy, “I ought to go
to the Technology.”
He meant to the Institute of Technology.
“Would you like to go there?”
“Of course I would. Why, if I went there I could make the frame of my own
house, and raise it, if the neighbors would help.”
Nor was the boy wrong. And his Aunt Fanny and Uncle Asaph determined he
should go, and go he did. He spent three months of that winter there,
four days of every week; and worked steadily eight hours a day. Still it
was different from what it would have been had he gone to a carpenter as
an apprentice. For then he would have had to do whatever the carpenter
was doing; and he would have had to take his chance for instruction. But
at the Technology he had regular teachers and regular practical lessons.
Of course he needed practice, and in the long run, it is only practice
which makes a first rate workman. But at the end, he had seen every
important part of a good carpenter’s work done, he knew why it was done,
and had had a hand in the doing of it.
The Institute of Technology is not a public school as the Dwight School
is, where Nahum had picked up his elementary instruction; and for his
lessons here they had to pay thirty dollars. But when, the next summer,
all the barns on his uncle’s farm in Harris were carried fourteen miles
by a tornado, and Nahum found himself directing the framing of a new
barn, and doing half the work, he and his aunt thought that those thirty
dollars had been well invested.
She took very good care that George should go into the carpenter’s class
at the Dwight School while they staid in Boston. He would not have been
obliged to go. No scholar took this course, excepting as an extra, but
_he_ took it because he wanted to. And, as Nahum had said, they were
obliged to keep in good standing in their other studies.
As for little Sibyl, Aunt Fanny judged, after full consultation with
her confidential adviser, Belle, that Sibyl had better stay where she
was—at the Grammar School. Aunt Fanny went down and made a state call on
Miss Throckmorton, the teacher of the school, and also saw Miss Bell,
the sewing teacher. She explained to them that while she did not want
to break any school rules, she should be well pleased to have as much
attention as possible given to Sibyl’s sewing. Miss Bell was really
pleased with the attention. She said a good many parents did not seem to
care anything about it. But if Sibyl would really give her mind to it,
she would see that she was able, before she left them in the spring, to
cut and fit a frock for Aunt Fanny or for her sister. And before they
went to Wisconsin, it proved that Miss Bell was as good as her word to
her little friend, and Sibyl made a very pretty dress for Aunt Fanny,
before she left school.