I always wanted to learn mighty bad, but I was glad when that was over.
"Every few days, all me life, I'd to be called up, looked over, and refused a home and love, on account of me hand and ugly face; but it was all the home I'd ever known, and I didn't seem to belong to any place else.
"Then a new superintendent was put in.

He wasn't for being like any of the others, and he swore he'd weed me out the first thing he did.

He made a plan to send me down the State to a man he said he knew who needed a boy.

He wasn't for remembering to tell that man that I was a hand short, and he knocked me down the minute he found I was the boy who had been sent him.

Between noon and that evening, he and his son close my age had me in pretty much the same shape in which I was found in the beginning, so I lay awake that night and ran away.