ke off the habits of his early life. He
had been taught that hard work was the chief end of man.

Of course such a farmer had a poor time of it, as well as the hands he
employed. He happened to be pretty well out of debt, there being only a
small mortgage on his farm; but he was so poor a manager that his hard
work went for little, in reality just enough to enable his family to
live, with sometimes very close shaving to pay interest. As to getting
rich, it was out of the question. He had a son whose name was Joe, a
smart, ambitious boy of sixteen years old; another son, Bill, two years
younger; and an orphan named Tony King, exactly a year younger than Joe;
together with a hired man for helper about the farm.

Mr. Spangler had found Tony in the adjoining county. On the death of his
parents, they being miserably poor, and having no relations to take care
of him, he had had a hard time among strangers. They kept him until old
enough to be bound out to a trade. Mr. Spangler thinking he needed
another hand, and being at the same time in such low repute as a farmer
and manager that those who knew him were not willing to let their sons
live with him as apprentices, he was obliged to go quite out of the
neighborhood, where he was not so well known, in order to secure one. In
one of his trips he brought up at the house where Tony was staying, and,
liking his looks,--for he was even a brighter boy than Joe Spangler,--he
had him bound to him as an apprentice to the art and mystery of farming.

In engaging himself to teach this art and mystery to Tony, he undertook
to impart a great deal more knowledge than he himself possessed,--a
thing, by the way, which is very common with a good many other people.
Altogether it was a hard bargain for poor Tony; but when parents are so
idle and thriftless as to expose their children to such a fate as his,
they leave them a legacy of nothing better than the very hardest kind of
bargains.

In addition to this help, about a year after Tony took up his quarters
with Mr. Spangler, there came along an old man of seventy, a sort of
distant relation of the Spanglers, who thenceforward made the farm his
home. Mr. Spangler and his wife called him "Benny," but all the younger
members of the family, out of respect for his age, called him "Uncle,"
so that in a very short time he went by no other name than that of
"Uncle Benny," and this not only on the farm, but all over the
neighborhood.

Uncle Benny