every so often, the school commissioners held an examination.
Thither resorted many, for the most part anxious to determine if
they really knew as much as they thought they did. If you took
that examination and got a "stiff kit" for eighteen months, you
had good cause to hold your head up and step as high as a blind
horse. A "stiff kit" for eighteen months is no small thing, let
me tell you. I don't know if there is anything corresponding
to a doctor's hood for such as win a certificate to teach school
for two years hand-running; but there ought to be. A fellow ought
not to be obliged to resort to such tactics as taking out a folded
paper and perusing it in the hope that some one will ask him:
"What you got there, Calvin?" so as to give you a chance to say,
carelessly, "Oh, jist a 'stiff-kit' for two years."

(When you get as far along as that, you simply have to take a term
in the junior Prep. Department at college, not because there is
anything left for you to learn, but for the sake of putting a gloss
on your education, finishing it off neatly.)

And then if you were going to read law with Mr. Parker, or study
medicine with old Doc. Harbaugh, and you kind of run out of clothes,
you took that certificate and hunted up a school and taught it.
Sometimes they paid you as high as $20 a month and board, lots of
board, real buckwheat cakes ("riz" buckwheat, not the prepared kind),
and real maple syrup, and real sausage, the kind that has sage in
it; the kind that you can't coax your butcher to sell you. The
pale, tasteless stuff he gives you for sausage I wouldn't throw out
to the chickens. Twenty dollars a month and board! That's $4 a
month more than a hired man gets.