CHAPTER XXIII.
WHEN I WENT AFTER THE EYESTONE A few evenings ago, I read in a Boston newspaper that, as the result of a close contest, Isaac Kane Woodbridge had been elected mayor of one of the largest and most progressive cities of the Northwest.
Little Ike Woodbridge! Yes, it was surely he.

How strangely events work round in this world of ours! Memories of a strange adventure that befell him years ago when he was a little fellow came to my mind, and I thought of the slender thread by which his life hung that afternoon.
The selectmen of our town had taken Ike Woodbridge from the poor-house and "bound him out" to a farmer named Darius Dole.

He was to have food, such as Dole and his wife ate, ten weeks' schooling a year, and if he did well and remained with the Doles until he was of legal age, a "liberty suit" of new clothes and fifty dollars.
That was the written agreement; and Farmer Dole, who was a severe, hard-working man, began early to see to it that little Ike earned all that came to him.

The boy, who was a little over seven years old, had to be up and dressed at five o'clock in the morning, fetch wood and water to the kitchen, help do chores at the barn, run on errands, pull weeds in the garden, spread the hay swathes in the field with a little fork, and do a hundred other things, up to the full measure of his strength.
The neighbors soon began to say that little Ike was being worked too hard.

When the old Squire was one of the selectmen, he remonstrated with Dole, and wrung a promise from him that the boy should have more hours for sleep, warmer clothes for winter, and three playdays a year; but Dole did not keep his promise very strictly.
The fall that little Ike was in his eighth year, the threshers, as we called the men who journeyed from farm to farm to thresh the grain, came to the old Squire's as usual.