When the week of suspension was over he came back, fuller of the devil than ever, and during a single forenoon did more mischief than he had before been capable of perpetrating in a month.  He was fourteen now, a stout chunk of a boy, awkward, defiant, and reckless.  He stayed in school two days this time, and was again suspended.  He came back once more after that and was then expelled.  He left school with a whoop and was on the streets most of the time thereafter.  It was then that his reputation as a bad boy began to grow rapidly.  He frequented the depot of the town and was on speaking terms with the railroad employes of the line.  He chewed tobacco in great mouthfuls, swore a great deal, and spent his days in loafing.  He had plans for going on the road as a brakeman when he became a year or two older.  Every day he sunk lower and people shook their heads and said, “How his mother’s heart must ache!”

But old Mrs. Heighten drew her $55 a month just the same, right along; and her daughter Amanda, who never did an honest day’s work in all her life, but lived in idleness, supported by the aforesaid $55—­she was the pride of the town.  She went to church every Sunday and sang in the choir, and at charity fairs she always stood behind the prettiest table, dressed in the prettiest clothes, and smiled and blushed and seemed so innocent and coy.  And there were rich young men who hung about her, and Amanda smiled on them, too, and people said, “What a lovely girl!” And her mother hoped that her daughter might marry one of these rich young men; it didn’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.”