ar he earned $15 a week for doing that work. When he
graduated they raised his pay from $15 to $45 a week, and offered him a
professorship, and as soon as they did he went right home to his mother.

_*If they had raised that boy's pay from $15 to $15.60 he would have
stayed and been proud of the place, but when they put it up to $45 at
one leap, he said, "Mother, I won't work for $45 a week. The idea of
a man with a brain like mine working for $45 a week!_ Let's go out in
California and stake out gold-mines and silver-mines, and be immensely
rich."

Said his mother, "Now, Charlie, it is just as well to be happy as it is
to be rich."

"Yes," said Charlie, "but it is just as well to be rich and happy,
too." And they were both right about it. As he was an only son and she a
widow, of course he had his way. They always do.

They sold out in Massachusetts, and instead of going to California they
went to Wisconsin, where he went into the employ of the Superior Copper
Mining Company at $15 a week again, but with the proviso in his contract
that he should have an interest in any mines he should discover for the
company. I don't believe he ever discovered a mine, and if I am looking
in the face of any stockholder of that copper company you wish he had
discovered something or other. I have friends who are not here because
they could not afford a ticket, who did have stock in that company at
the time this young man was employed there. This young man went out
there, and I have not heard a word from him. I don't know what became
of him, and I don't know whether he found any mines or not, but I don't
believe he ever did.

But I do know the other end of the line. He had scarcely gotten out of
the old homestead before the succeeding owner went out to dig potatoes.
The potatoes were already growing in the ground when he bought the farm,
and as the old farmer was bringing in a basket of potatoes it
hugged very tight between the ends of the stone fence. You know in
Massachusetts our farms are nearly all stone wall. There you are obliged
to be very economical of front gateways in order to have some place to
put the stone. When that basket hugged so tight he set it down on the
ground, and then dragged on one side, and pulled on the other side, and
as he was dragging that basket through this farmer noticed in the upper
and outer corner of that stone wall, right next the gate, a block of
native silver eight inches square. That professor