Aunt Deel asked me to give it to you to keep.

You're old enough now an' you'll be goin' away to school before long, I guess." I took the letter and read again the superscription on its envelope: To Master Barton Baynes-- (To be opened when he leaves home to go to school.) I put it away in the pine box with leather hinges on its cover which Uncle Peabody had made for me and wondered again what it was all about, and again that night I broke camp and moved further into the world over the silent trails of knowledge.
Uncle Peabody went away for a few days after the harvesting.

He had gone afoot, I knew not where.

He returned one afternoon in a buggy with the great Michael Hacket of the Canton Academy.

Hacket was a big, brawny, red-haired, kindly Irishman with a merry heart and tongue, the latter having a touch of the brogue of the green isle which he had never seen, for he had been born in Massachusetts and had got his education in Harvard.