"
(When you get as far along as that, you simply have to take a term
in the junior Prep. Department at college, not because there is
anything left for you to learn, but for the sake of putting a gloss
on your education, finishing it off neatly.)
And then if you were going to read law with Mr. Parker, or study
medicine with old Doc. Harbaugh, and you kind of run out of clothes,
you took that certificate and hunted up a school and taught it.
Sometimes they paid you as high as $20 a month and board, lots of
board, real buckwheat cakes ("riz" buckwheat, not the prepared kind),
and real maple syrup, and real sausage, the kind that has sage in
it; the kind that you can't coax your butcher to sell you. The
pale, tasteless stuff he gives you for sausage I wouldn't throw out
to the chickens. Twenty dollars a month and board! That's $4 a
month more than a hired man gets.
But it wasn't alone the demonstration that, strange as it might
seem, it was possible for a man to get his living by his wits
(though that has done much to produce great men) as it was the
actual exercise of teaching. Remember the big boys on the back
seats, where the apple-cores and the spit-balls come from. The
school-director that hired you gave you a searching look-over and
said: "M-well-l-l, I'm afraid you haint hardly qualified for our
school - oh, that's all right, sir; that's all right.
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