“Let me introduce myself, in turn, as Harry Walton, junior apprentice in the office of the ‘Centreville Gazette,’ sometimes profanely called ‘printer’s devil.’”

“Good!” said Oscar, laughing.  “How do you like the business?”

“I think I shall like it, but I have only just started in it.  I went into the office for the first time to-day.”

“I have an uncle who started as you are doing,” said Oscar.  “He is now chief editor of a daily paper in Boston.”

“Is he?” said Harry, with interest.  “Did he find it hard to rise?”

“He is a hard worker.  I have heard him say that he used to sit up late of nights during his apprenticeship, studying and improving himself.”

“That is what I mean to do,” said Harry.

“I don’t think he was as lazy as his nephew,” said Oscar.  “I am afraid if I had been in his place I should have remained in it.”

“Are you lazy?” asked Harry, smiling at the other’s frankness.

“A little so; that is, I don’t improve my opportunities as I might.  Father wants to make a lawyer of me so he has put me here, and I am preparing for Harvard.”

“I envy you,” said Harry.  “There is nothing I should like so much as entering college.”

“I daresay I shall like it tolerably well,” said Oscar; “but I don’t hanker after it, as the boy said after swallowing a dose of castor oil.  I’ll tell you what I should like better—­”

“What?” asked Harry, as the other paused.

“I should like to enter the Naval Academy, and qualify myself for the naval service.  I always liked the sea.”

“Doesn’t your father approve of your doing this?”

“He wouldn’t mind my entering the navy as an officer, but he is not willing to have me enter the merchant service.”

“Then why doesn’t he send you to the Naval Academy?”

“Because I can’t enter without receiving the appointment from a member of Congress.  Our member can only appoint one, and there is no vacancy.  So, as I can’t go where I want to, I am preparing for Harvard.”

“Are you studying Latin and Greek?”

“Yes.”

“Have you studied them long?”

“About two years.  I was looking over my Greek lesson when you playfully tumbled over me.”

“Will you let me look at your book?  I never saw a Greek book.”

“I sometimes wish I never had,” said Oscar; “but that’s when I am lazy.”

Harry opened the book—­a Greek reader—­in the middle of an extract from Xenophon, and looked with some awe at the unintelligible letters.

“Can you read it?  Can you understand what it means?” he asked, looking up from the book.

“So-so.”

“You must know a great deal.”

Oscar laughed.

“I wonder what Dr. Burton would say if he heard you,” he said.

“Who is he?”

“Principal of our Academy.  He gave me a blowing up for my ignorance to-day, because I missed an irregular Greek verb.  I’m not exactly a dunce, but I don’t think I shall ever be a Greek professor.”