appreciate your anxiety to leave school.  I had that desire myself when I was a boy of about fifteen, but my father succeeded in making me change my opinion on the subject, and without much argument, unless you can call an ox-team and a stony pasture an argument.  I had been asking to stay at home from school for a long time.  I said that I was too old to be sitting there with a lot of girls and some younger boys, and that I wanted to work.  Finally, my father said that I could stay at home if I cared to, and that he would let me work on the farm for a time.  I was overjoyed, of course, at the prospect of staying out of school.

“The next morning I was awakened at four o’clock, and had to swallow my breakfast in a hurry, because I was late, my father said.  Then he took me out to the barn and ordered me to hitch up the ox-team, and when this was done he took me out to a pasture lot and told me to pick up all the boulders there.  Well, I picked up boulders all day long, and by evening my back and arms were so sore I could hardly move them.  I was too tired to eat supper, and was soon asleep in bed.  When my father awoke me at four the next morning, I told him to let me alone and that I was going back to school.  After that I was content to stay in school, and said nothing more about leaving until I had finished the course and was ready to go to college.”

And Archie thought it very queer that such a famous man should have had such experiences when a boy.  He remained in the drawing-room for more than an hour, and when he left he felt perfectly sure that he had been talking with the most charming man in the world.

The train sped on and on, and when daylight came the next morning they were passing through Northern Ohio.  Early in the afternoon they reached a great smoky metropolis, spread out for miles over the plains.  Archie knew that this must be Chicago, and he decided, as this was Saturday, and the steamer wouldn’t leave San Francisco until the next Friday, that he would have time to remain here over Sunday.  So he left the train at the station in Pacific Avenue, and, Finding a hotel near the station, he started out to see something of the city famous for its dirt and for the World’s Fair, two widely different things.

CHAPTER XIII.

   San Francisco—­ the transport gone—­ working his way to Honolulu by
   peeling vegetables on A Pacific liner—­ the capital of Hawaii.

Archie found Chicago to be so widely different from New York that everything he saw was new and interesting to him.  In the afternoon he managed to see something of the congested business section of the city, the tall office buildings, the great stores, and the famous Board of Trade.  It was all very fine, he thought, but still it wasn’t nearly so fascinating to him as New York had been on the first day he visited