“What will my duties be if I go there, and how much money can I earn?” asked Tom.
“Why, of course you will have to begin at the lowest round of the ladder, and work your way up,” answered the merchant. “You must be on hand at six o’clock in the morning, to sweep out the office, and make the fires, if the weather is cold; and, during the day, you will have to do errands about the village.”
If there was any thing Tom had a horror of, it was running on errands. The idea of going about the streets with a bundle under his arm was intolerable to him; and the thought of building fires and sweeping out the office was no less distasteful. What would his aristocratic young friends say when they found that he was an errand boy?
“O, no,” answered Tom, at length, “I can’t do that. I can’t sweep, or make fires, or run on errands. It wouldn’t look well, and I wouldn’t do it for a hundred dollars a month. But I’ll do any thing else.”
“What else can you do?” asked Mr. Newcombe. “Now, Tom, if you could have any position in the office you wanted, what would you ask for?”
Tom looked at his father, then out of the window, and rapidly called to mind the occupations of the different clerks employed in his father’s office. Suddenly a bright idea occurred to him, and Tom was certain that he had at last discovered the very thing he wanted.
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” said he. “I’ll be a book-keeper.”
“Why, Tom!” exclaimed Mr. Newcombe, astonished at his son’s ignorance, “how could you be a book-keeper? Here you are, fourteen years old, and can’t tell how much six and eight are without counting your fingers. You can’t fill a position of that kind until you pay more attention to your arithmetic.”
This was another piece of news to Tom. He was a good deal disappointed, for he had suddenly taken it into his head that he would like to be a book-keeper, but again that useful, but (as far as Tom was concerned) much despised branch of education, arithmetic, stood in his way. He looked at his father a moment, then down at the carpet, and finally said: