"What do you mean?" asked Tom.
"It is a story my father used to tell," said Eben. "One time late in November, when there was snow on the ground, a party of Indians came and camped out in the edge of the Long Woods, near my grandfather's house, and two or three days after the old gentleman said to his son, 'Come, let us go down and see the Indians, and find out how they are off for provisions. I dare say they haven't too much to eat.' So down they went, father carrying a basket of apples. The first person they came across was an old Indian, who was sitting on the end of a log gnawing a piece of cold corn-cake, which looked as if it might have been a week old. Do you like that?' asked my grandfather."
"The old man stopped eating, and answered, with a great deal of gravity and dignity, 'He's my wittle, and I will like him!'"
"Humph!" said Tom, guessing the application of the story.
"Father used often to quote the old man's answer to Flora and me when we complained of what we had to do," continued Eben, busily going on with his work meanwhile; "and I often think of it, and say to myself, 'He's my wittle, and I will like him.'"
"I don't see the sense of it, anyway," said Tom, though he did see well enough.
"The sense is plain," returned Eben. "If you can't do what you like, the next best thing and anyhow is to like what you do, and anyhow if you keep on doing the best you can, you almost always learn to like it."
"I never shall learn to like this place, I know, and I don't care whether I do or not," said Tom. "It isn't any place for me, and I don't see what father wanted me to come here for, anyhow. Jeduthun Cooke bosses me round, and tells me to do this and that, and when I say anything to Mr. Antis, all the good I get is, 'Oh, ask Jeduthun; he'll tell you what to do.'"
"But, Tom, if you were clerk in a store, you'd have to be ordered round by somebody quite as much as you are now. You would have to be on your feet all day, and called here and there by everybody. I have been shopping with mother at Hobartown, and in the city, too, sometimes, and I thought people were very provoking. They called the clerks this way and that, and made them pull down heaps of things, and then wouldn't take anything, after all. It was just having fifty bosses instead of one. I am sure Jeduthun is always good-natured."
"Good-natured! Yes, very much! You ought to have heard him scold this morning, just because I left the office alone a few minutes to run out and speak to one of the boys; and I haven't a minute for any fun from morning till night."