r
assets than unlimited credit at the bookstore, so Keg began to prowl for
a job. Presently he picked up a laundry route. The laundry wagon was a
favorite vehicle on which to ride to fame and knowledge in those days.
By getting up early two mornings a week and working late nights, Keg
managed to put away about six dollars and forty-five cents a week,
providing every one paid his laundry bill. He was so pleased and tickled
over the idea that he wrote to his father at once explaining that he now
had plenty of work, but had had to move downtown in order to do it.

Did this please old pain-in-the-face? Not noticeably. There had been no
such things as laundry wagons in his day. Students were lucky if they
had a shirt to wear and one to have washed at the same time. He wrote a
letter back to Keg that bit him in every paragraph. He was to give up
the frivolous laundry job and get some wood to saw. That and tending
cows were the only real methods of toiling through college. He, Keg's
father, had received his board and room for milking cows and doing
chores, and he had sometimes earned as much as three dollars a week
after school hours and before breakfast sawing cordwood at seventy-five
cents a cord. It was healthful and classic. He would send his old saw by
express. And he was further to remember--there were about four more
pages to memorize, a headache in every page.

Good old Keg did his best to be obedient, but he had no chance. In the
first place, cordwood was phenomenally scarce in Jonesville, and anyway,
people had a vicious habit of hindering the cause of education by sawing
it at the wood-yards with a steam saw. There were plenty of cows in the
outskirts, but they were either well provided with companions for their
leisure hours, or their owners declined to allow Keg to practice on
them--he knowing about as much about a cow as he did about a locomotive.
And so he dawdled on with us at the chapter house, gulping down Livy,
getting a strangle hold on Homer, and pulling in six or seven dollars a
week at his frivolous laundry job, some of which cash he was saving up
for a dress suit. And then, one day, Pa Rearick blew in for another
visit and caught his son playing a mandolin in our lounging room--far,
far from the nearest cyclone cellar.

To judge from the conversation that followed--we couldn't help hearing
it, although we went out-of-doors at once--one might have thought that
Keg had been caught in a gilded den of sin