CHAPTER X. TONY RICHARDSON.
"Anthony, why didn't you do this during school hours?"
The speaker was Mr. Bliss, the principal of one of the St. Louis grammar schools. He leaned back in his chair and looked at a young fellow about sixteen years of age, who stood in front of the rostrum with his eyes fastened upon a dog's-eared algebra he held in his hand. This was Tony Richardson, of whom we had something to say in the first volume of this series, and he was the only son of one of the wealthiest steamboat owners in the city.
"Don't you think this thing is getting to be a little too monotonous?" continued the principal. "This makes the third time that you have been kept after school this week for coming to the recitation-seat unprepared."
"My head is so thick I can't learn figures," replied Tony. "It seems to run in the family. I have heard my father say that he was the poorest scholar in his class, so far as mathematics were concerned. No matter how hard he studied, he couldn't get his lesson."
"But the trouble with you is, you do not study unless you are obliged to do so," answered Mr. Bliss. "To be candid with you, Anthony, I think you have fallen into the way of allowing your mind to wander off to the ends of the earth, when it should be kept right here in the school-room and concentrated on your books. That is a most ruinous habit, and you would do well to break it off at once. You have committed this lesson in ten minutes, simply because you knew that you would be required to do so before you could go home. You could have mastered it in the same length of time during school hours, if you had set about it in earnest. Now, see if you can't give a better account of yourself in future. Try it for one short week—for your father's sake, if you won't try it for your own. That will do."
"For my father's sake," said Tony, to himself. "I don't see why I should exert myself to please him, when he goes out of his way to refuse every request I make of him."
He walked back to his desk, placed his algebra upon the shelf with the rest of his books—it would have given him more pleasure if he could have kindled a fire with it in the stove—bade his teacher good-night and went out. Most boys would have been too sulky to be courteous, but Tony Richardson was not that sort. With all his faults he was not mean-spirited.
"This thing is getting to be a trifle too monotonous," said he, as he put on his hat and descended the stairs, "and I am not going to stand it much longer; that's all there is about that. I don't see why father wants me to study algebra, when he hated it so cordially himself. I'll warrant that there are not two captains in his whole fleet who know the binomial-theorem from a side of sole-leather, and yet they are all good commanders. If they can run a boat without knowing anything about mathematics, I don't see why I can't do the same. I want to go to sea—I just know I was born to be a sailor—and if father won't let me go, he must give me a place on one of his boats. I can tell him that much."
While these thoughts, and a good many others like them, were passing through Tony's mind, he was walking rapidly toward the levee. When he came within sight of the river he saw there, among the scores of other vessels with which the levee was lined, one of his father's magnificent boats, the Telegraph, which was advertised to start for New Orleans on the following Monday. The engineer had just sounded his gong, and a boy about his own age was ascending the steps that led into the pilot-house. The captain had stationed himself near the bell that stood on the forward part of the hurricane-deck, and the hands, under the charge of one of the mates, were awaiting the order to haul in the gang-plank and cast off the lines.