Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 10.djvu/617

Rh "Well, now," said the master, after he was reduced to his last effort, "did you bring it?" "No, sir, I did not!" The master sat down exhausted. "Well," said he, "you are certainly a most provoking and incorrigible devil." He ordered Tom to get his slate and books and quit the school. And with this third expulsion Thomas Edward finished his "education" at the age of about seven years.

And let us not be hard on the Scotch system of education. To be sure, the schools did but little to encourage a taste for natural history, but we have a great many pretentious educational establishments now that are not a whit in advance of them. And our state system has no place for little enthusiastic nuisances like Tom Edward. A teacher in a Brooklyn institution of high claims, thinking, not long ago, that the book "natural history" might be somewhat alleviated by a little acquaintance with the real objects about which the pupils were learning lessons, encouraged them to collect some natural-history specimens. A few cocoons were accordingly brought in, and hung up in the class-room, and watched with much eagerness until the pupils began to fear nothing would ever come of them. But one morning it was observed that a large and beautiful moth was emerging from a chrysalis, and the class became much excited with interest at the novel and curious spectacle. But for such excitement, from so strange a cause, there was no provision in the order of the school. And when the grammarian came in to take the class, they did not enter into his stupefying processes with the customary facility, at which he was so shocked that he reported his difficulty to the governing authority, and a score of the children were kept after school as a punishment for the interest they had taken in an insect metamorphosis!

School being done, young Edward went to work. He first got a place in a tobacco-factory at fourteen pence a week. Here he staid two years, having risen through the grades of responsibility until he got eighteen pence a week, but his master happened to be a bird-fancier, and favored Tom's tastes in catching animals. Leaving this place, he got a situation in a woolen-factory, at some distance from home, receiving at first three and at last six shillings a week. Besides, he got on as a night-hand, and thus had much of the day to himself for rambling in the woods, and getting acquainted with the flowers, insects, and birds. These were happy times. Tom was at the factory two years, and was then taken away that he might be bound as an apprentice to a trade. The happy genius of his father selected for him as a life-occupation the intellectual and ennobling craft of the shoemaker. He was indentured at the age of eleven to Charles Begg, who was to teach him for six years the art and mystery of making shoes, at eighteen pence a week for the first year, with sixpence a week advance each succeeding year—aprons and shoes to be supplied—time, six in the morning until nine at night; specialty, pump-making, in which Begg excelled.