was bound to a carpenter for seven years,
during which he was to receive for his services his board and his
clothes. Already he had done almost the work of a man on the farm, being
a stout, handy fellow, and in the course of two or three years he did
the work of a full-grown carpenter; nevertheless, he received no wages
except the necessaries of life. Fortunately the carpenter's family were
human beings, and he had a pleasant, friendly home during his
apprenticeship.

Even under the gentlest masters apprentices, in old times, were kept
most strictly to their duty. They were lucky if they got the whole of
Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July for holidays.

Now, this apprentice, when he was sixteen, was so homesick on a certain
occasion that he felt he _must_ go and see his mother, who lived near
her old home, twenty miles from where he was working on a job. He walked
the distance in the night, in order not to rob his master of any of the
time due to him.

It was a terrible night's work. He was sorry he had undertaken it; but
having started he could not bear to give it up. Half the way was through
the woods, and every noise he heard he thought was a wild beast coming
to kill him, and even the piercing notes of the whippoorwill made his
hair stand on end. When he passed a house the dogs were after him in
full cry, and he spent the whole night in terror. Let us hope the
caresses of his mother compensated him for this suffering.

The next year when his master had a job thirty miles distant, he
frequently walked the distance on a hot summer's day, with his
carpenter's tools upon his back. At that time light vehicles, or any
kind of one-horse carriage, were very rarely kept in country places, and
mechanics generally had to trudge to their place of work, carrying their
tools with them. So passed the first years of his apprenticeship.

All this time he was thinking of quite another business,--that of
clock-making,--which had been developed during his childhood near his
father's house, by Eli Terry, the founder of the Yankee wooden-clock
manufacture.

This ingenious Mr. Terry, with a small saw and a jack-knife, would cut
out the wheels and works for twenty-five clocks during the winter, and,
when the spring opened, he would sling three or four of them across the
back of a horse, and keep going till he sold them, for about twenty-five
dollars apiece. This was for the works only. When a farmer had bought
the machinery of a cl