"That's a curious way the world has, and you'll be too big a philosopher
in a few years to ask questions like that. If you want the truth, I've
wrangled with Peter Lytton,--it's no use appealing to Tom Mitchell,--but
he's a bit close, as you know, when it actually comes to putting his
hand in his pocket. He didn't send any of his own sons to New York or
England, and never could see why anyone else did. Schooling, of course,
and he always had a tutor and a governess out from England; but what the
devil does a planter want of a college education? I argued that I
couldn't for the life of me see the makings of a planter in you, but
that by fishing industriously among your intellects I'd found a certain
amount of respectable talent, and I thought it needed more training than
I could give it; that I was nearing the end of my rope, in fact. Then he
asked me what a little fellow like you would do with a college education
after you got it, for he couldn't stand the idea of you trying to earn
your living in a foreign city, where there was ice and snow on the
ground in winter; and when I suggested that you might stay on in the
college and teach, if you were afraid of being run over or frozen to
death in the street, he said there was no choice between a miserable
teacher's life and a planter's, and he'd leave you enough land to start
you in life. I cursed like a planter, and left the house. But he loves
you, and if you plead with him he might give way."

"I'd do anything else under heaven that was reasonable to get to New
York but ask any man for money. Peter Lytton knows that I want learning
more than all the other boys on this island; and if I'm little, I've
broken in most of his colts and have never hesitated to fight. He finds
his pathos in his purse. Why can't I make two thousand pieces of eight?"

"You'd be so long at it, poor child, that it would be too late to enter
college; for there's a long apprenticeship to serve before you get a