Page:The gold brick (1910).djvu/135

 and this made Jamie sad. He longed to help her, but he did not know what to do. Then a friend of theirs, Mr. Woodbridge, said he could get Jamie a place in the house as a page boy—they always say "page boy" in the legislature—and one morning Jamie's mother dressed him in his Sunday suit and sent him up to the state house with Mr. Woodbridge.

And so he became a page. He was paid a dollar and a half a day. Every twenty days the pay-*rolls were made out, and Jamie would go down to the treasury, sign his name in a big, round hand, "James Horn," and then proudly take home to his mother thirty dollars in fresh, crisp, green bills! His mother had wished him to stay in school, but, of course, being a page was better than going to school. There were no books to study, and then you got out so much earlier every day! And more than all, you couldn't take home money from school!

The house met every morning at ten o'clock, and after the speaker had taken his place under the canopy where the beautiful flag was draped, and had rapped for order, and the chaplain had prayed, the clerk would call the roll for the introduction of bills.