We got home at half past eight and found my aunt greatly worried.  She had done the chores and been standing in her hood and shawl on the porch listening for the sound of the wagon.  She had kept our suppers warm but I was the only hungry one.

As I was going to bed the Senator called me to him and said: 

“I shall be gone when you are up in the morning.  It may be a long time before I see you; I shall leave something for you in a sealed envelope with your name on it.  You are not to open the envelope until you go away to school.  I know how you will feel that first day.  When night falls you will think of your aunt and uncle and be very lonely.  When you go to your room for the night I want you to sit down all by yourself and open the envelope and read what I shall write.  They will be, I think, the most impressive words ever written.  You will think them over but you will not understand them for a long time.  Ask every wise man you meet to explain them to you, for all your happiness will depend upon your understanding of these few words in the envelope.”

In the morning Aunt Deel put it in my hands.

“I wonder what in the world he wrote there—­ayes!” said she.  “We must keep it careful—­ayes!—­I’ll put it in my trunk an’ give it to ye when ye go to Canton to school.”

“Has Mr. Wright gone?” I asked rather sadly.

“Ayes!  Land o’ mercy!  He went away long before daylight with a lot o’ jerked meat in a pack basket—­ayes!  Yer uncle is goin’ down to the village to see ’bout the mortgage this afternoon, ayes!”

It was a Saturday and I spent its hours cording wood in the shed, pausing now and then for a look into my grammar.  It was a happy day, for the growing cords expressed in a satisfactory manner my new sense of obligation to those I loved.  Imaginary conversations came into my brain as I worked and were rehearsed in whispers.

“Why, Bart, you’re a grand worker,” my uncle would say in my fancy.  “You’re as good as a hired man.”

“Oh, that’s nothing,” I would answer modestly.  “I want to be useful so you won’t be sorry you took me and I’m going to study just as Mr. Wright did and be a great man if I can and help the poor people.  I’m going to be a better scholar than Sally Dunkelberg, too.”

What a day it was!—­the first of many like it.  I never think of those days without saying to myself:  “What a God’s blessing a man like Silas Wright can be in the community in which his heart and soul are as an open book!”

As the evening came on I took a long look at my cords.  The shed was nearly half full of them.  Four rules of syntax, also, had been carefully stored away in my brain.  I said them over as I hurried down into the pasture with old Shep and brought in the cows.  I got through milking just as Uncle Peabody came.  I saw with joy that his face was cheerful.

“Yip!” he shouted as he stopped his team at the barn door where Aunt Deel and I were standing.  “We ain’t got much to worry about now.  I’ve got the interest money right here in my pocket.”