“I suppose there is,” said Uncle John, gravely. “There is to almost anything, if you do it right.”
After that, Billy’s days went on, one very like another. It seemed to him that there was no end to the things he had to learn. He had very little time to spend in wishing, though every night he went out for a good look at the mountains. But he was beginning to think about the kind of man that he would like to be; and every day he was a little more sure that he wanted to be like the young superintendent.
He was so short himself that he was afraid that he would never be as tall as Mr. Prescott. So he began to stand as tall as he could, especially when he was in the office. Then he tried to remember to breathe deep, the way that the teacher at school had told the boys to do. But he wondered, sometimes, when he looked at Mr. Prescott’s broad shoulders, whether he had ever been as small as most boys.
The day that Billy had his first little brown envelope with three dollars and fifty cents in it, he stood very tall indeed. That night, at supper, he handed it to Aunt Mary, saying:
“That’s for you to put in the bank.”
“For Billy,” said Uncle John, looking up quickly and speaking almost sternly. “I’m the one to give Aunt Mary money.”
Then he said gently: “It’s a good plan, Billy, to put your first money in the bank. You’ll never have any more just like that.”
The thing that first excited Billy’s curiosity, as he went about on errands, was the big pile of old iron in the mill yard. There were pieces of old stoves, and seats from schoolhouses that had been burned, and engines that had been smashed in wrecks, and old ploughs, and nobody knew what else—all piled up in a great heap.
One day, when he carried an order to the man that tended the furnace in the cupola where they melted the iron, he saw them putting pieces of old iron on the scales; and he heard the man say to his helper: “We shall have to put in fifty pounds extra to-day.”
It seemed to Billy that it wasn’t quite fair to put in old iron, when they were making new machinery. So, one noon, he asked Uncle John about it.