My aunt kept me at home so often that she had to invent a most formidable array of excuses to send to my teacher, excuses which I had to write and carry. We never had any note-paper in the house, as there were so few letters ever written. When there was an excuse to write, I would take a crumpled paper bag, in which had been onions or sugar, or, when there were no paper bags, and the school bell was ringing, requiring haste, I would tear off a slip of the paper in which salt pork or butter had been wrapped, and on it write some such note as this: “Dear Miss A: This is to say that Al had to stay home yesterday for not being very well. I hope you will excuse it. Very truly yours,” and my aunt would scribble her name to it, to make it authoritative. It must have been the sameness of the notes, and their frequency, that brought the white-haired teacher to remonstrate with my aunt for keeping me away from school so much. “He can never learn at his best,” complained the teacher. “He is really getting more and more behind the others.” My aunt listened humbly enough to this complaint and then unburdened herself of her thoughts: “What do I care what he learns from books! There is coal and wood that’s needed and he is the one to help out. I only let him go to school because the law makes me. If it wasn’t for the law you’d not see him there, wasting his time. It’s only gentlemen’s sons that have time for learning from books. He’s only a poor boy and ought to be earning his own living. Coal and wood is more to the point in this house than books and play. Let them play that has time and go to school that has the money. All you hear in these days is, ‘School, school, school!’ Now, _I_ have got through all these years without schooling, and others of my class and kind can. Why, Missis, do you know, _I_ had to go into the mill when I was a slip of a girl, when I was only _seven_, there in England. I had to walk five miles to work every morning, before beginning the hard work of the day, and after working all day I had to carry my own dinner-box back that distance, and then, on top of that, there was duties to do at home when I got there. No one ever had mercy on me, and it isn’t likely that I’ll go having mercy on others. Who ever spoke to _me_ about schooling, I’d like to know! It’s only people of quality who ought to go to get learning, for its only the rich that is ever called upon to use schooling above reading. If _I_ got along with it, can’t this lad, I’d like to know?” And with this argument my teacher had to be content, but she reported my absences to the truant officer, who came and so troubled my aunt, with his authority, that she sent me oftener to school after that. About this time, at the latter end of winter, uncle removed to the region of the mill tenements again. I changed my school, also. This time I found myself enrolled in what was termed the Mill School.