II.
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.