“I despise the whole thing as much as ever, but I like the redemptioner well enough thus far; the old saying is ‘you must summer and winter a man to find him out,’ and I have not done either yet.”
“If you haven’t changed your mind and still despise the whole thing, what made you take this redemptioner?”
“I got kind of inveigled into it. Had he been grown man, such as most any one would have been glad to have, I would have had nothing to do with it, but when I came to look at the poor lad, lame, with scarcely a rag to his back, without friends or money, and in a strange land, when I found that he came out of a workhouse, and naturally thought he could do no farm work, and noticed how kind of pitiful he looked, you don’t know how it made me feel. I knew in reason that boy would be like to suffer, because well-to-do people would not have him, and he would be almost certain to fall into the hands of those who would abuse him.”
“I see it worked on your feelings.”
“More than that, it worked upon my conscience. I knew I was able to protect that boy; something seemed to say to me, ‘Jonathan Whitman, you won’t sell an old horse that has served you well, lest he should fall into bad hands; are you going to turn your back upon a friendless boy, made in the image of God who has blessed you in your basket and your store?’ Still I could hardly bring myself to take a boy who had been born, as it were, brought up, at least, in a workhouse, and thought to give him a ten-dollar bill and get off in that way.”
“You didn’t want to take him into the family with your own children?”
“You’ve hit the nail on the head. As I said at first, I got inveigled into it and took him; but if it was to be done over again I would do it. Now that you have wormed all this out of me, I am going to measure you in your own bushel. For these six years past you’ve been aching to take a redemptioner, and importuning me to take one, now that you’ve got one, how do you like him?”
“Not over and above, and I don’t mean to do much in the way of clothing him, or keeping him, till I find him out. When I come to see how much less he does than a man I could hire; and feel that I must keep and board him all winter when he won’t earn his board; must run the chance of his being taken sick or getting hurt, I find that it is not, after all, such cheap labor as I at first imagined,—let alone the risk of his running away after he finds out what wages he can get elsewhere. I am going to find out what’s in him before I throw away any more money on him. By the way, don’t you think you’re beginning rather strong with your redemptioner? You take a boy right out of the workhouse, who, by all accounts, has been hardly used and kept down, bring him into your family, dress him up and treat him just like one of your own children; don’t you think he’ll be like to get above himself and you too, and give you trouble?”
“I don’t calculate to make him my heir, or indulge him to his injury; but I mean that he shall have the privilege of going to meeting and to school as my children do.”
“To school! What, send a redemptioner to school?”