"No; 'twas just your misfortune. You seem to attract adventures like that. Why, if I was to let you go into the cotton mills as you are always begging to do you'd have every machine there out of order in less than a week and yourself hashed up into little pieces into the bargain." She had touched upon an unlucky subject for instantly, with flaming face, the lad confronted her. "No, I wouldn't. I wish you would let me go into the mills, Ma. You might let me try it. Ever so many boys no older than I are working there and earning oodles of money. If we had more money we could----" "We could be having an automobile, no doubt, and going to Palm Beach winters," was the grim response. "Well, Palm Beach or not, you're not going into any mill so long as we can keep body and soul together without your doing it. You are going to get an education--you and Mary too--if it costs me my life. I'm not going to have you grow up knowing nothing and being nothing. Some day you'll see I was right and thank me for it." "I thank you now, Ma," declared Carl soberly. "But that doesn't make me relish Latin and history any better." "No matter if it doesn't. What you like is of no consequence," Mrs. McGregor announced, with a majestic sweep of her hand. "The chief thing is that you exercise your mind and learn how to use it. The Latin itself amounts to nothing. It is like boxing gloves or a punching bag, a thing that serves its turn to limber up your brain. It is learning to think that counts." Carl's face brightened. "The teacher was saying something like that just the other day," asserted he eagerly. "He was telling us about some of the people who had done great things in the world and explaining how long and how hard they had to work at them. The inventors, for instance, had to think and think about the things they invented. It didn't just come to them all in a minute as I used to believe it did." Although his mother did not look up from her sewing she nodded encouragingly. "There was Eli Whitney," continued Carl, coming nearer. "I remembered about him because of the mills here. He invented the cotton gin, you know. Mr. Kimball told us that Whitney went through Yale and then started down South to be a tutor in somebody's family without any idea of ever being an inventor. But when he got to where he was going the people who had hired him had changed their minds and found somebody else and poor Eli Whitney was out of a job." "A shabby trick!"