and their labours were pushed accordingly. One day, while at work with the men, one of them said to James:

“Yer are school-boys, I understand.”

“Yes, we are,” answered James.

“Where’d yer larn to farm it?”

“At home, and all about. We’ve had to earn our living,” was the reply of James.

“Yer are no worse for that; it won’t damage your larnin.”

“I expect not; I should say good-bye to the scythe if I thought so,” replied James. “If there had been no work, there would have been no education for me.”

“What yer goin’ to make—a preacher?”

“That is an unsolved problem,” answered James, in a playful way. “I have undertaken to make a man of myself first. If I succeed, I may make something else afterwards; if I don’t succeed, I shall not be fit for much, any way.”

“Yer in a fair way to succeed, I guess,” responded the labourer, who seemed to have the idea, in common with other people, that James was aiming to be a minister.

When the day of settlement with the boys came, the farmer said:

“Now, boys, what must I pay you?”

“What you think is right,” replied James, at the same time thinking that the farmer’s emphasis of the word boys indicated boys’ pay.

“I s’pose you don’t expect men’s wages; you are only boys.”

“If boys do men’s work, what’s the difference?”

“Well, you see, boys never have so much as men: there’s a price for boys, and there’s a price for men. Some boys will do more work than others, but the best of them only have boys’ pay.”

“But you told the men that we mowed wider swaths and mowed better than they, and beat them. Now admit that we are boys, if we have done men’s work, why should we not have their pay? I told you at first to pay us what was right, and I say so now; and if we have worked as well as your men, or better, is it not right that we should have their pay?”

James’s plea was a strong one, and the farmer felt its force. There was but one honourable course out of the difficulty, and that was to pay the boys just what he did the men.

“Well, boys, I can’t in justice deny that you did as much work as the men,” he said, “and so I’ll pay you men’s wages; but you are the first boys I ever paid such wages to.”

“I hope we are not the last ones,” added James, who was never in a strait for a reply.

The farmer paid them full wages, and parted with them in good feeling, wishing them success in their struggles for an education, and saying to James:

“If, one of these days, you preach as well as you mow, I shall want to hear you.”