“It is a good time to think of it now then. You are not more than sixteen or seventeen,” suggested the captain. “If you like, I will receive you as a pupil in the Beech-Hill Industrial School, where you can become a carpenter or a machinist, or learn to run an engine. You can stay for a year or longer, and it will cost you nothing. I think you said your father was very poor, and no other member of the family seems to be earning any thing.”
“My father has hard work to get along. His farm is mortgaged for about all it is worth, and it takes all the money he can raise to pay the interest; and he is afraid he will lose all his property.”
“If you will come to my school, I will put you in the way of saving money enough from your
wages another year to pay your father’s interest. If I don’t I will pay it myself.”
“I think a word from you would get me a place in some store in Burlington. If you would recommend me”—
“How can I recommend you when I never saw you before in my life? I don’t do things in that way,” interposed Captain Gildrock. “If you join the school, I will see that you are in a position to earn fair wages another year. One of our last year’s boys gets thirty dollars a month besides his board. All of them get twenty or more. After they have had experience they will command from fifty to a hundred dollars a month. You can think of it, and let me know your decision in a few days; for the school opens on the 1st of September.”
The party reached the hotel by this time. Dory and Bolingbroke were summoned to appear as witnesses in the case of Lingerwell the next day. Captain Gildrock found the ten recruits for the school at the hotel. He had picked them up among his friends in Montpelier, St. Albans, and St. Johnsbury. If he did not know it before, he had ascertained on his trip to Burlington with them, that they were a set of wild boys.
He was in a hurry to get them to Beech Hill before they tore any houses down, or did any other mischief. At least five out of the ten had been expelled from private schools or academies, because the instructors could not manage them; three of them were the sons of wealthy men; and all of them were supposed to have a liking for mechanical pursuits. The captain was confident that he could manage them after he got them to his estate.
Dory was satisfied that he could seat them all in the Goldwing, for he had often taken out twenty in her on pleasure-excursions. But his uncle was afraid they would “cut up,” as he expressed himself, and make trouble on the passage. He spoke to them about going in the schooner, and they were delighted with the idea. Most of them had never been on the lake in any sort of a craft, and some had never even seen a steamboat or a sailboat.
Captain Gildrock consented to the arrangement after he had charged the recruits to behave with propriety in the boat, and to obey the orders of the skipper. They promised to do these things, and they were marched down to the wharf. Bolingbroke