“There’s no ‘of course’ about it,” answered his father. “You would be balloted for the same as the rest; and I have been told that one black-ball would keep you out for a year.”
“Humph!” exclaimed Tom. “They wouldn’t black-ball us. I guess our folks have just as much money as any body here.”
“No, they haven’t; and even if they had, it would make no sort of difference. Money doesn’t rule the world up here as it does down in New London. I am informed that some of the boys in that company are so poor that the others had to help them buy their uniforms.”
“Humph!” said Tom. “Well, if that’s the sort of trash they take into their company, I don’t know that I care to belong to it, do you, boys? We don’t have any thing to do with such fellows in the city.”
“Couldn’t we gradually weed them out?” asked Loren. “That’s the way we did with our ball club, you know.”
“Yes, and what was the consequence?” demanded his father. “You ‘weeded out’ your very best players, and you have been beaten by every club you have met since. Served you right, too.”
“Well, I would rather be beaten than be chums with fellows who were too mean to chip in two or three dollars when we wanted to get up a dinner,” observed Loren.
“They were not too mean; they couldn’t do it. The two or three dollars that you speak of so lightly, were a large sum in the eyes of boys whose fathers gain a livelihood by working by the day, and you ought to have exercised a little common sense in your dealings with them. If it were necessary that you should have the dinner or starve, why did you not pay for it yourselves, and not ask those poor boys to ‘chip in’, as you term it? There’s the high school,” said Mr. Farnsworth, pointing with his cane to an imposing building, standing in the midst of extensive and well-kept grounds which occupied one whole block of the village property.
“That’s my great objection to Mount Airy,” said Ralph, shaking his fist at the school house. “Our teacher told us one day last term that the binomial theorem is just the same in China and Brazil that it is in New London, so I suppose it must be the same up here. Fine scenery around a school house doesn’t make the lessons inside any easier.”
“You’re right there,” growled Tom, who was thinking of those Orations of Cicero to which he would have to devote his attention next term, “I’d much rather go fishing.”