WHEN OLD ZACK WENT TO SCHOOL This same week, I think, there was a commotion throughout the town on account of exciting incidents in what was known as the "Mills" school district, four miles from the old Squire's, where a "pupil" nearly sixty years old was bent on attending school--contrary to law! For ten or fifteen years Zachary Lurvey had been the old Squire's rival in the lumber business.

We had had more than one distracting contention with him.

Yet we could not but feel a certain sympathy for him when, at the age of fifty-eight, he set out to get an education.
Old Zack would never tell any one where he came from, though there was a rumor that he hailed originally from Petitcodiac, New Brunswick.

When, as a boy of about twenty, he had first appeared in our vicinity, he could neither read nor write; apparently he had never seen a schoolhouse.

He did not even know there was such a place as Boston, or New York, and had never heard of George Washington! But he had settled and gone to work at the place that was afterwards known as Lurvey's Mills; and he soon began to prosper, for he was possessed of keen mother wit and had energy and resolution enough for half a dozen ordinary men.
For years and years in all his many business transactions he had to make a mark for his signature; and he kept all his accounts on the attic floor of his house with beans and kernels of corn, even after they represented thousands of dollars.