“Oh, I was in the first class, and so I had only one year’s course. It was eighteen lessons. The first day we tried to strike square blows with the hammer. Some of us did not strike very square, I tell you. All the beginning with nails came the first day. The last lesson was ‘planing and squaring, marking, making tenon, making mortise, and fastening mortise and tenon.’ I wrote a letter to another fellow, and I copied it from the school regulations.” So Nahum went out to his own work shop in the shed, which, as it happened, Aunt Fanny had never seen before, because Nahum kept it under his own key. In the afternoon the tray was made. “This will make you no end of comfort in Wisconsin, Nahum.” “But if I am to do carpenter work, really,” said the boy, “I ought to go to the Technology.” He meant to the Institute of Technology. “Would you like to go there?” “Of course I would. Why, if I went there I could make the frame of my own house, and raise it, if the neighbors would help.” Nor was the boy wrong. And his Aunt Fanny and Uncle Asaph determined he should go, and go he did. He spent three months of that winter there, four days of every week; and worked steadily eight hours a day. Still it was different from what it would have been had he gone to a carpenter as an apprentice. For then he would have had to do whatever the carpenter was doing; and he would have had to take his chance for instruction. But at the Technology he had regular teachers and regular practical lessons. Of course he needed practice, and in the long run, it is only practice which makes a first rate workman. But at the end, he had seen every important part of a good carpenter’s work done, he knew why it was done, and had had a hand in the doing of it. The Institute of Technology is not a public school as the Dwight School is, where Nahum had picked up his elementary instruction; and for his lessons here they had to pay thirty dollars. But when, the next summer, all the barns on his uncle’s farm in Harris were carried fourteen miles by a tornado, and Nahum found himself directing the framing of a new barn, and doing half the work, he and his aunt thought that those thirty dollars had been well invested. She took very good care that George should go into the carpenter’s class at the Dwight School while they staid in Boston. He would not have been obliged to go. No scholar took this course, excepting as an extra, but _he_ took it because he wanted to. And, as Nahum had said, they were obliged to keep in good standing in their other studies.