“I’ve got fifty cents too;” said Andy. “Yes, I’ll go. Father won’t object to my goin’ to hear Sam, and of course we won’t stay out very late.”
Bill and Andy were boy chums, who at the present speaking were roosting on a picket fence, in that seemingly comfortable manner in which bipeds of their species seem perfectly capable of doing. They were good-hearted, industrious boys, but rather thoughtless at times, and the parents of both often felt troubled that they seemed to care so little for “book learning.”
Sure enough, when the Town Hall was filling with a half interested, half curious audience to hear Sam Andrew’s story, among the rest, on the back seats, sat Bill and Andy.
Pretty soon Sam began; he told how, through struggles and hardships, want and poverty, he had persisted in gaining an entrance into the seminary.
All at once, Bill swallowed hard, then whispered to his companion,
“I say, Andy, let’s give Sam twenty cents instead of ten!”
“Yes, let’s,” readily agreed Andy.
Sam went on; he told how fever broke out among some of the seminary boys, and he and a few others spent the last cent they could raise in getting medicines, and alas! a coffin in more than one case.
This time Bill gulped down a great sob, and whispered brokenly,
“Andy, old boy, let’s make it thirty cents; a heart of stone couldn’t stan’ that!”