My aunt kept me at home so often that she had to invent a most formidable array of excuses to send to my teacher, excuses which I had to write and carry. We never had any note-paper in the house, as there were so few letters ever written. When there was an excuse to write, I would take a crumpled paper bag, in which had been onions or sugar, or, when there were no paper bags, and the school bell was ringing, requiring haste, I would tear off a slip of the paper in which salt pork or butter had been wrapped, and on it write some such note as this:
“Dear Miss A: This is to say that Al had to stay home yesterday for not being very well. I hope you will excuse it. Very truly yours,” and my aunt would scribble her name to it, to make it authoritative.
It must have been the sameness of the notes, and their frequency, that brought the white-haired teacher to remonstrate with my aunt for keeping me away from school so much.
“He can never learn at his best,” complained the teacher. “He is really getting more and more behind the others.”
My aunt listened humbly enough to this complaint and then unburdened herself of her thoughts: “What do I care what he learns from books! There is coal and wood that’s needed and he is the one to help out. I only let him go to school because the law makes me. If it wasn’t for the law you’d not see him there, wasting his time. It’s only gentlemen’s sons that have time for learning from books. He’s only a poor boy and ought to be earning his own living. Coal and wood is more to the point in this house than books and play. Let them play that has time and go to school that has the money. All you hear in these days is, ‘School, school, school!’ Now, I have got through all these years without schooling, and others of my class and kind can. Why, Missis, do you know, I had to go into the mill when I was a slip of a girl, when I was only seven, there in England. I had to walk five miles to work every morning, before beginning the hard work of the day, and after working all day I had to carry my own dinner-box back that distance, and then, on top of that, there was duties to do at home when I got there. No one ever had mercy on me, and it isn’t likely that I’ll go having mercy on others. Who ever spoke to me about schooling, I’d like to know! It’s only people of quality who ought to go to get learning, for its only the rich that is ever called upon to use schooling above reading. If I got along with it, can’t this lad, I’d like to know?”
And with this argument my teacher had to be content, but she reported my absences to the truant officer, who came and so troubled my aunt, with his authority, that she sent me oftener to school after that.
About this time, at the latter end of winter, uncle removed to the region of the mill tenements again. I changed my school, also. This time I found myself enrolled in what was termed the Mill School.
As I recall it, the Mill School was a department of the common schools, in which were placed all boys and girls who had reached thirteen and were planning to enter the mill as soon as the law permitted. If you please, it was my “finishing school.” I have always considered it as the last desperate effort of the school authorities to polish us off as well as they could before we slipped out of their care forever. I am not aware of any other reason for the existence of the Mill School, as I knew it.
However, it was a very appropriate and suggestive name. It coupled the mill with the school very definitely. It made me fix my mind more than ever on the mill. Everybody in it was planning for the mill. We talked mill on the play-ground, drew pictures of mills at our desks, dreamed of it when we should have been studying why one half of a quarter is one fourth, or some similar exercise. We had a recess of our own, after the other floors had gone back into their classrooms, and we had every reason to feel a trifle more dignified than the usual run of thirteen-year-old pupils who plan to go through the grammar, the high, and the technical schools! After school, when we mixed with our less fortunate companions, who had years and years of school before them, we could not avoid having a supercilious twang in our speech when we said, “Ah, don’t you wish you could go into the mill in a few months and earn money like we’re going to do, eh?” or, “Just think, Herb, I’m going to wear overalls rolled up to the knees and go barefooted all day!”
If the thumbscrew of the Inquisition were placed on me, I could not state the exact curriculum I passed through during the few months in the Mill School. I did not take it very seriously, because my whole mind was taken up with anticipations of working in the mill. But the coming of June roses brought to an end my stay there. The teacher gave me a card which certified that I had fulfilled the requirements of the law in regard to final school attendance. I went home that afternoon with a consciousness that I had grown aged suddenly. When my aunt saw the card, her enjoyment knew no bounds.