't make much difference which, so long
as he was rich and could keep Amanda in idleness, while she could go
and live on his bounty and quit the school room that she hated and have
a rosewood coffin and plenty of carriages at her funeral.

But until all these things were accomplished the old lady "had to have
a place," and Amanda lolled about in idleness.

Meantime "Dodd" "waxed worse and worse."

Do you see any relation between "Dodd" and Amanda, good folks? If you
do, remember that this boy was only one of scores of pupils that had to
suffer, substantially as he did, that the poor and proud Mrs. Heighten
and her lazy daughter Amanda might continue to keep up appearances, and
still have a chance to sponge a living off some man at the expense of a
legal relation which it is sacrilege to call marriage.

Out upon such proud and lazy frauds, every one of them, whose worthless
lives are sustained by the destruction of the characters of children
like "Dodd" Weaver, and all the rest who fall under such tuition!

CHAPTER X.

So it was that "Dodd" got into the street and achieved the reputation
of being a boy that no teacher could do anything with. In the year or
two that followed he made several starts at school, but his reputation
always preceded him, and the old story was told over again--one or two
suspensions, then "expelled."

So time went on till "Dodd" was nearly seventeen. He was almost a man
grown now--a swaggering, profane, vulgar fellow, who ate his meals at
home and slept there, usually, but further than that lived apart from
his parents, who every day regretted that ever he had been born.

You all know this boy, don't you, beloved? He is in every town that I
know of, and there are duplicates and triplicates, not to say
centiplicates, of him in some of our larger cities. I wonder if it is
worth while to try to do anything with these boys, or for them? The
machine has dropped them, or thrown them out. They will not run
through the great educational mill known as the "graded system." They
seem destined to go to the bad, and it seems to me the tendency of the
machine, and some of its managers, is to let them go. Yet they ought
not to go. As there is a God in heaven, they ought not to.

But the machine does not care so very much for these things, either for
the boys or for the Personage just mentioned, whose name the managers
revere enough to teach the children that it should always be written