“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.