“Pooh! Pooh!” scoffed Mr. Vinton, good-naturedly. “What’s the matter with our own High School, Dan? Isn’t it good enough for you, son?”
Dan tried to explain that it was the school life he wanted to try, and, unfortunately for his argument, mentioned “Tom Brown.”
“Tom Brown!” exclaimed his father. “Well, that’s a fine story, Dan, but it’s all romance. I went to boarding-school myself, and I can tell you I never ran up against any of the things you read about in ‘Tom Brown.’ No, son, if that’s all you want you might as well stay right here in Graystone. You’ll find just as much of the ‘Tom Brown’ romance in High School as you will back East.”
Dan wanted to tell his father that the kind of school he wanted to go to was little like the boarding-school which his father had attended. Mr. Vinton’s early education had been obtained at the Russellville Academy, an institution whose name was out of all proportion to its importance. Mr. Vinton had been born in one of the smaller towns along the Willimantic River in Connecticut, and Russellville Academy had possessed for him the advantages of proximity and inexpensiveness. The tuition and board was one hundred dollars a year, and on Friday afternoon he could reach home by merely walking twelve miles. Mr. Vinton’s schooling had terminated abruptly in the middle of his third year, when the death of his mother—his father had died years before—left him dependent on an uncle living in Ohio. So Russellville Academy was abandoned in favor of a position in the Graystone Flour Mills. To-day Mr. Vinton owned the mills and, for that matter, pretty much everything else in that part of the county. But the fact that he had succeeded in life on a very slim education hadn’t made him a scoffer at schools and colleges; on the contrary, he was a firm believer in those institutions and was determined that Dan, who was an only son, should have the best education that money and care could provide.
Dan’s private and unexpressed opinion of Russellville Academy wasn’t flattering. He believed that his father must have had a pretty forlorn, unpleasant experience there. But Mr. Vinton had come to look back upon his few years of school life through rose-tinted glasses.
“There were only about thirty of us fellows,” he would say when in reminiscent mood, “but maybe we had better times for that reason; every fellow knew every other fellow. Why, the first month I was there I fought more than half the school!”
“Did you ever get licked?” asked Dan eagerly.
“Licked!” laughed Mr. Vinton. “Lots of times, son. Why, seems to me as I look back at it, my nose was out of kilter more than half the time!”
“You must have been a set of young barbarians,” observed Dan’s mother with conviction on one occasion.
“Nothing of the sort, Mary; just a parcel of youngsters full of life. We didn’t think anything of a fight; used to make up half an hour afterwards and bandage each other’s heads.”