The Two Towers: Main

No, they didn't want the school.

The town was noisy enough, what with the hammering down at the tinshop making a rhythm to which Templeton had adjusted its pace for forty years.

It wasn't that the townsfolk were ungrateful to John Boynton or that they were unsympathetic to education. They had supported a high school for several years, long before other towns of their size had voted such munificence. An unusually large number of their boys had traveled great distances to go to college, and some of them were giving Templeton a reputation for breeding brilliant sons. Christopher Columbus Baldwin had become librarian of the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester. And just two years before, in 1862, Jonathan Turner had brought credit to Templeton when the nation had adopted his plan for federally-supported state institutions to be known as land-grant colleges.

Now the young Alden boy down on the Partridgeville Road was soon to enter the Scientific School at Harvard.

George Alden's mother deserved a lot of credit. Although this year, for the first time, the town records had listed the boy now that he was old enough to pay a poll tax, there was no one to breathe a whisper of criticism in face of the dignity with which Priscilla Alden had brought up her son. She had been accorded every possible courtesy and had been given the five-hundred dollar tax exemption usually reserved for widows. When she had had to mortgage the homestead farm, the words had blazed out from the page almost in defiance: "Know all men, I, Priscilla E. Alden of Templeton, single woman . . ."

But she wore no scarlet letter.

Often young George had climbed the hill to the maple stump marking the boundary line of the Turner farm, there to look across the valley toward the mountain which separated him from an unknown world. All his life he had lived in the shadow of this mountain.

Now Wachusett seemed almost friendly, for soon he would be able to walk around to its other side. This was what "going to school" helped boys to do.

How George Alden could manage to go to college there was no one brash enough to question. He had worked for several months in the chair factory, and he planned to live with his Uncle Harvey, overseer of the Union Railroad stable in Cambridge. But even so, going to college was almost a precedent and it did cost money.

It was possible that someone was helping the boy. Perhaps even John Boynton was planning to pay the bills. He had been known to