Ella, a little schoolgirl of the sixties

A Little Schoolgirl of the Sixties
ELLA
ELLA A Little Schoolgirl of the Sixties
A Book for Children and for Grown-Ups who Remember
BY EVA MARCH TAPPAN WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY RUTH J. BEST
BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY The Riverside Press Cambridge 1923
COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY EVA MARCH TAPPAN ALL RIGHTS RESERVED The Riverside Press CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
TO “BOY COUSIN” AND THE DAYS ON THE BEARCAMP
The nicest thing that ever happened to a little girl eight years old was going to happen to Ella, and she was so delighted that she could hardly sit still in the big clumsy stage-coach that rolled and shook and swung slowly away from the city. Uphill and downhill it went, past ponds and meadows and brooks and woods, and little new houses and big old homesteads shaded by ancient elms or maples. Every roll of the wheels brought the little passenger nearer to perfect happiness.
Ella was going to live in a seminary, and surely nothing could be more charming than that. She knew all about seminaries, for she had visited one when she was little—at least two years before. The girls had petted her and given her candy; the principal had presented her with a story-book. Best of all, she had slept in an old-fashioned bed with a canopy, such a bed as she had never seen anywhere else. What could be more delightful! And now she was going to have every day such pleasures as these, and no one knew how much more marvelous ones.
By and by the stage came to a scattered village with a church or two, a schoolhouse, and a post-office. After the mail had been left, the driver turned up a long avenue with fields and a line of trees on either hand. At the head of the avenue was a circle of tall fir trees, and back of the circle was a large white building with a wing at each end, a narrow piazza in front, and tall fluted columns rising from its floor to the top of the second story.
The driver called “Whoa!” A tall man came from somewhere and shook hands with Ella’s mother and with herself. Then he led the way upstairs to some bare, almost unfurnished rooms. The mother was to use the furniture from her old home, and it had not yet arrived. After a little talk, they all went down some dark and winding stairs to the dining-room, a large, low, gloomy basement room with two long tables. The end of one of them was “set,” and there Ella and her mother and the tall man and two or three other grown-ups ate supper.