wo cents
an hour. Boys who had no skates and could not beg or borrow and who had
but one cent could sometimes get one skate for a while and thus glide
gracefully on one foot. There was good fishing through the ice, only it
was awful cold work and not much pay, for fish could hardly be given
away. In the Summer there were clams to dig, blueberries to gather, and
pond-lilies had a value--I guess so! Then in the early Spring folks
raked up their yards and made bonfires of the Winter's debris. Henry
Rogers did these odd jobs, and religiously took his money home to his
mother, who placed it in the upper right-hand corner of a bureau drawer.
The village school was kept by an Irishman who had attended Harvard. He
believed in the classics and the efficacy of the ferrule, and doted on
Latin, which he also used as a punishment. Henry Rogers was alive and
alert and was diplomatic enough to manage the Milesian pedagogue without
his ever knowing it. The lessons were easy to him--he absorbed in the
mass. Besides that, his mother helped nights by the light of a whale-oil
lamp, for her boy was going to grow up to be a schoolteacher--or
possibly a minister, who knows!

Out in Illinois, when the wanderlust used to catch the evolving youth,
who was neither a boy nor a man, he ran away and went Out West. In New
England the same lad would have shipped before the mast, and let his
parents guess where he was--their due punishment for lack of
appreciation.

To grow up on the coast and hear the tales of the seafaring men who have
gone down to the sea in ships, is to catch it sooner or later. At
fifteen Henry Rogers caught it, and was duly recorded to go on a whaler.
Luckily his mother got word of it, and canceled the deal. About then,
good fortune arrived in the form of Opportunity. The young man who
peddled the New Bedford "Standard" wanted to dispose of his route.

Henry bought the route and advised with his mother afterward, only to
find that she had sent the seller to him. Honors were even. His business
was to deliver the papers with precision. Later he took on the Boston
papers, also. This is what gave rise to the story that Henry Rogers was
a newsboy.

He was a newsboy, but he was a newsboy extraordinary. He took orders for
advertisements for the "Standard," and was also the Fairhaven
correspondent, supplying the news as to who was visiting whom; giving
names of good citizens who were shingling their chicken-houses, and
mentioning th