"Have you indeed, sir?"
Grandfather Fernald nodded.
"I was brought up on a Vermont farm when I was a boy."
"You don't say so! Well, well!"
"Yes, I never had much schooling," went on the old man. "Of course I picked up a lot of practical knowledge, as a boy will; and in some ways it has not been so bad. But it was a pretty mixed-up lot of stuff and I have been all my life sorting it out and putting it in order. I sometimes wonder when I think things over that I got ahead at all; it was more happen than anything else, I guess."
"The Vermonters have good heads on their shoulders," Mr. Turner remarked.
"Oh, you can't beat the Green Mountain State," laughed the senior Mr. Fernald, unbending into cordiality in the face of a common interest. "Still, when it came to bringing up my boy I felt as you do. I wasn't satisfied to have him get nothing more than I had. So I sent him to college and gave him all the education I never got myself. It has stood him in good stead, too, and I've lived to be proud of what he's done with it."
"And well you may be, sir," Mr. Turner observed.
Mr. Clarence Fernald flushed in the face of these plaudits and cut the conversation short by saying:
"It is that kind of an education that we want to give your boy, Mr. Turner. We like the youngster and believe he has promise of something fine. We should like to prepare him for college or some technical school and send him through it. He has quite a pronounced bent for science and given the proper opportunities he might develop into something beyond the ordinary rank and file."