“Oh! my golly!  Charlie, your mother makes good pies!” he exclaimed with rapture, as soon as he could get his mouth sufficiently clear to speak.  “Give us another bite,—­only a nibble.”

But Charlie knew by experience what Kinch’s “nibbles” were, and he very wisely declined, saying sadly as he did so, “You won’t get many more dinners from me, Kinch.  I’m going to leave school.”  “No! you ain’t though, are you?” asked the astonished Kinch.  “You are not going, are you, really?”

“Yes, really,” replied Charlie, with a doleful look; “mother is going to put me out at service.”

“And do you intend to go?” asked Kinch, looking at him incredulously.

“Why of course,” was the reply.  “How can I help going if father and mother say I must?”

“I tell you what I should do,” said Kinch, “if it was me.  I should act so bad that the people would be glad to get rid of me.  They hired me out to live once, and I led the people they put me with such a dance, that they was glad enough to send me home again.”

This observation brought them to the school-house, which was but a trifling distance from the residence of Mrs. Ellis.

They entered the school at the last moment of grace, and Mr. Dicker looked at them severely as they took their seats.  “Just saved ourselves,” whispered Kinch; “a minute later and we would have been done for;” and with this closing remark he applied himself to his grammar, a very judicious move on his part, for he had not looked at his lesson, and there were but ten minutes to elapse before the class would be called.

The lessons were droned through as lessons usually are at school.  There was the average amount of flogging performed; cakes, nuts, and candy, confiscated; little boys on the back seats punched one another as little boys on the back seats always will do, and were flogged in consequence.  Then the boy who never knew his lessons was graced with the fool’s cap, and was pointed and stared at until the arrival of the play-hour relieved him from his disagreeable situation.

“What kind of folks are these Thomases?” asked Kinch, as he sat beside Charlie in the playground munching the last of the apple-tart; “what kind of folks are they?  Tell me that, and I can give you some good advice, may-be.”

“Old Mrs. Thomas is a little dried-up old woman, who wears spectacles and a wig.  She isn’t of much account—­I don’t mind her.  She’s not the trouble; it’s of old Aunt Rachel, I’m thinking.  Why, she has threatened to whip me when I’ve been there with mother, and she even talks to her sometimes as if she was a little girl.  Lord only knows what she’ll do to me when she has me there by myself.  You should just see her and her cat.  I really don’t know,” continued Charlie, “which is the worst looking.  I hate them both like poison,” and as he concluded, he bit into a piece of bread as fiercely as if he were already engaged in a desperate battle with aunt Rachel, and was biting her in self-defence.