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with incredulous, delirious faces, and, leaning heavily, wearily on one another, gave the cheer for Andover. And the touch of Stover's arm on McCarty's shoulder was like an embrace. - OWEN JOHNSON.

HOW THE ICE-BOAT WAS WRECKED

CAMBERWELL is like many other rural towns of New England where the population has grown sparse. Schoolhouses where formerly fifty or sixty boys and girls were wont to assemble have been abandoned because there ceased to be enough pupils to make it worth while to hire a teacher for them. Instead, two and even three former districts have united to support one school in a central station.

But this plan has its disadvantages. The children now have a long way to walk to school, in some cases three or four miles. To remedy this a "pupil-collector" is employed to gather up the children and carry them to and fro, by wagon or sleigh. Camberwell Pond is three or four miles in length, and one of the new union schoolhouses is in the little village near the foot of it. Early in the winter ten of the boys and girls, hailing from former school districts in the upper portion of the town, hit on a novel method of going to school by means of an ice-boat, contrived by two of the older boys, James Waite and Saxon Noyes.

It was great fun. The young people all liked it, and it appeared to be attended by no unusual danger. Perhaps it Iwould not have been but for a certain characteristic fault of one of the boys, whom we will here call Calvin - Calvin

In other respects Calvin is a fairly good boy, as boys of fourteen go, but he has this bad trait. When he breaks anything or makes a mistake, instead of owning up honorably, as any manly boy will do, Calvin tries to hide it, cover it up, slip the broken article out of sight, so that the deed may be laid to some one else.

One morning in November he chanced to knock down the school thermometer, and broke it, but pretended that the wind blew it down. The larger boys take turns there hauling down and housing the school flag at night. Being in a hurry one evening, Calvin accidentally tore the flag, but denied it when the damage was discovered the next morning. One of the smaller boys, he said, had trodden on it. These and numerous other sly acts and untruths have come home to Calvin since the story of the wreck became known. This is the way it happened:

There was a moon the night before, and during the evening Calvin used the ice-boat to carry a girl, who had been visiting his sister, home to the village at the foot of the pond. The wind blew fitfully.

While running before it up the pond, on his way home, quite a hard gust struck the boat. The sail jibed. Like many such craft, this ice-boat was steered by a tiller controlling the hindmost runner. In a quick effort to hold the boat from sluing, Calvin split the lever where it was mortised to the hind runner, and had to walk and draw the boat the rest of the way up the pond.

He did not like to own up to the damage, and did not want the other boys to know that he had used the boat. He had a clapboard nail in his pocket, and what he did was to patch up

the lever at the mortise by driving in that nail with a stone. It went in aslant and did little good; but the mortise was out of sight beneath the back seat on the deck. He thought it would not be noticed for a while, and might be laid to some one else.

The next morning the whole party of pupils started for school on the ice-boat, Saxon steering it, quite unaware that the tiller was weakened. As they neared the foot of the pond the wind was blowing smartly. In trying to make the little cove where they usually landed, Saxon put the tiller over sharply to port or tried to. It gave way. The nail pulled out. He lost control of the craft, and they went ashore with a violent crash on a rocky point, twenty or thirty yards to leeward. All were more or less bruised and hurt. One of the girls lay insensible for an hour, another had her arm dislocated. Saxon himself received a bad cut from one of the sharp runners. There was a general mix-up of lunch-boxes and books.

The ice-boat itself was an utter wreck. On overhauling it, however, the nail and the split mortise were discovered, and indignant inquiries were begun.

Calvin kept quiet, and for two days escaped detection. The facts then came out through the girl whom he had carried home. She had been telling all her friends of the nice moonlight ride she had taken on the ice-boat. Calvin was cornered and forced to own up to the damage and to the nail.

It is not wholly surprising that after school the following afternoon the students held an indignation meeting. Calvin tried to slip away, but they compelled him to remain and sit up in front, where they could all look at him. They told him what they thought of him very plainly, and Saxon said, by

way of a final admonition, "Now, Cal, if ever we catch you in any more of these sneak tricks and cover-up games, we will make it so hot for you here that you will be glad to go off and live with the foxes and other sly animals."

It is to be hoped that this vigorous ultimatum worked a reform. -The Youth's Companion.

THE HISTORIES OF TWO BOYS

EMERSON prefaced his essay on "Compensation" with the remark that he had always wanted to write on that subject. There is a true story on compensation from the salary viewpoint that I have always wanted to write, and now I am going to do it. The two young men to whom the story refers were schoolboy friends of mine. I knew the facts in the case of each and can tell the story with exactitude.

These two boys may be called Smith and Brown. They were graduated in the same year from the same high school. They had been chums, more or less, for years, and decided to start in the turmoil of life in the same business house, if possible. Positions were secured in the same large dry-goods store. More than that, both young men were assigned to work as tyro salesmen behind the lace counter.

"This isn't much of a place," remarked Brown, rather dubiously.

""Tis not a bad place," returned Smith, consolingly, "and we're getting five dollars a week to start with. Not very bad pay for boys!"

There were long hours to be served, and the work was hard.

There were many impatient customers to be waited upon. As both boys lived some twenty minutes' walk from the store, they walked home together in the evening.

"Pretty slow life, this!" grumbled Brown. "Think of the pay we're getting."

"It's not bad for youngsters," rejoined Smith. "It might be worse."

Neither boy had any living expense to pay, save for noonday luncheon and laundry. Smith brought his luncheon; Brown did not. Smith began to bank an account; Brown went to dances as often as he could afford the money. He soon found other pastimes, of evenings, that absorbed all his money and what he could borrow from his father. Naturally the two boys began to drift apart, except for that little evening walk home. Brown began to grumble at what he termed the slowness of promotion.

"It will come all right," returned Smith, "if we work for it."

At the end of the first year Brown observed,

"I guess you're right. My pay has been raised a dollar a week. A fine return for hard work, isn't it? Did you get a raise?"

"Yes; I've been raised to seven."

Brown whistled his amazement, looked thoughtful for a few moments, and then blurted out,

"That's a sample of the favoritism that goes on in the business world. Whom did you get on the right side of?"

"I don't know," answered Smith, and he told the truth. "I'm going to find out about this," grumbled the other boy, and he did. The department manager supplied the informa

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