“And spoil your parents’ greatest happiness,” said Hans. “Let me tell you something. My folks were poorer than yours. They were so poor they couldn’t think of educating their children. Their greatest happiness was in work and seeing others work with their hands. They couldn’t realize what education would do. They had no way of realizing it. Somehow or other I got the ambition to have an education. In order to do that I had to earn enough money to pay into the family what I could have made working daytimes.
“This was only after I was old enough to work for others. So I worked early in the morning and late at night and made up to the folks the time I spent at school. Now your parents know the value an education will be to you. Your father is a Lowell graduate and they have been saving this money for years in order to spend it on your first year at Lowell, trusting to luck that some way will be found to let you go on. It’s been their one great happiness and they’d probably feel mighty bad to see you turn up at home without their sending for you.
“All you ought to be thinking of is how to get the most out of it this year and get ready to make the burden lighter for the next year. Winning one of the Scholarship Prizes would do it of course, but there are other ways.”
“You put it up to me in a different way than I had thought of it before,” said Hal. “If I thought I could earn some money working nights, I think I’d try it.”
“If you think that way about it, I’ll see what I can do. We’ll go round to the employment department of the University in the morning and see if they haven’t something to do for a poor and needy student to help him earn his way, especially one who is utility pitcher on the Varsity. Meantime I guess we had better send a telegram to your folks asking if your father is better or worse. We can have an answer by morning.”
“I think that would be a good idea,” said Hal, very much cheered by his talk with Hans and his suggestions. “Come to think of it, though, as you say, if he was sick enough to make them want me, they would telegraph, anyhow, I suppose.”
“By the way,” said Hans. “Where did you expect to get the money to get home on?”
And then Hal told him his idea about pawning his watch, of his effort to do so before he started for Boston, and that he had intended to do it in Boston.
“I wouldn’t do that ever until I had to,” remarked Hans. “Anyway not to go home on. If you can pawn it for enough to get to California on, you can pawn it for enough to keep you going at school for the rest of the term. I wouldn’t do it until I had to, though. It’s a bad practice to get into, although I never was in a pawnshop in my life, and hope I never have to go.”
“I wonder how much they would loan me on the watch,” said Hal. “Suppose we try it and see when we get to Boston. Just to see what it is worth, anyhow.”