heir dear teacher said farewell. Parents wept.
It was a teary time. I only said, "Weep not for me, dear friends. I am
going away, but I am coming back." I thought to cheer them up, but they
wept the more.

Next day I drew my money. I had it all in one joyous wad--$240. I was
going home with head high and aircastles even higher. But I never got
home with the money. Talk about the fool and his money and you get very
personal.

For on the way home I met Deacon K, and he borrowed it all. Deacon K
was "such a good man" and a "pillar of the church." I used to wonder,
tho, why he didn't take a pillow to church. I took his note for $240,
"due at corncutting," as we termed that annual fall-time paying up
season. I really thought a note was not necessary, such was my
confidence in the deacon.

For years I kept a faded, tear-spattered, yellow note for $240, "due at
corncutting," as a souvenir of my first schoolteaching. Deacon K has
gone from earth. He has gone to his eternal reward. I scarcely know
whether to look up or down as I say that. He never left any forwarding
address.

I was paid thousands in experience for that first schoolteaching, but I
paid all the money I got from it--two hundred and forty
thirteen-mile-a-day dollars to learn one thing I could not learn from
the books, that it takes less wisdom to make money, than it does to
intelligently handle it afterwards. Incidentally I learned it may be
safer to do business with a first-class sinner than with a second-class
saint.

Which is no slap at the church, but at its worst enemies, the foes of
its own household.

Calling the Class-Roll

A lyceum bureau once sent me back to my home town to lecture. I imagine
most lecturers have a hard time lecturing in the home town. Their
schoolmates and playmates are apt to be down there in the front rows
with their families, and maybe all the old scores have not yet been
settled. The boy he fought with may be down there. Perhaps the girl who
gave him the "mitten" is there.

And he has gotten his lecture out of that home town. The heroes and
villains live there within striking distance. Perhaps they have come to
hear him. "Is not this the carpenter's son?" Perhaps this is why some
lecturers and authors are not so popular in the home town until several
generations pass.

I went back to the same hall to speak, and stood upon the same platform
where twenty-one years before I had stood to deliver my graduating
orati