“But I don’t want to take you out of school, Harry,” she protested. “You are getting along so well. Why, next year you’ll be in high school.”
“No, I won’t, Mother. Do you think that a great big boy like me is going to let his mother support him any longer? It’s time I went to work. Besides, I haven’t the money for clothes and books and all the other things high school fellows have to have. I’m past sixteen. Lots of boys have to go to work when they’re only fourteen. I guess it won’t hurt me any to begin now.”
“But I want you to have an education, Harry. If your father had lived, he intended to let you go through high school and then to college.” Mrs. Harding’s voice trembled a little. The sudden death of her husband two years previous had been a shock from which she had never quite recovered. It was hard for her even to mention his name without shedding tears.
“I’ll get an education, somehow, and work, too,” returned Harry confidently. “There are night schools where a fellow can go and learn things. Please let me quit school to-morrow and try,” he pleaded. “I can’t earn much at first, but even three dollars a week’ll help some. I’ve got to start some time, you know. If you won’t let me go to work I could sell papers after school.”
“No, you couldn’t,” retorted his mother with decision. “I’d rather have you leave school than see you racing around the city streets selling papers. That’s one thing you sha’n’t do.”
“Then let me go and hunt a job,” begged the boy.
“I’ll think it over. Now go on studying your lesson and don’t tease me any more about it.”
Harry took up his book obediently enough. His frequent pleading to leave school to go to work had always been promptly vetoed by his mother. She had struggled desperately to keep her son in school and was willing to go on with the struggle. It was Harry himself who had repeatedly begged her to allow him to take his place in the work-a-day world. She could never quite bring herself to the point of consenting to the boy’s plea. But, to-night, as she thought darkly of their poverty and of their continual fight against actual want she was nearer consent than she had ever been before.
Perhaps Harry felt this, for it was not long until the book went down on the table again. “Do say you’ll let me try, Mother,” he implored earnestly. “You don’t know how much it means to me. It isn’t as if I’d stop trying to learn things as soon as I started to work. I’d study harder than ever. Just think how much the money would help us after I’d been working awhile. Why, some of the greatest men that ever lived had to quit school and go to work when they were lots younger than I. Benjamin Franklin did, and so did Abraham Lincoln. Just yesterday the teacher read us a story of how Lincoln earned his first dollar when he was a boy.”