Was there any way in which a boy could help her?
He grasped his new friend, the little boy from Kentucky. He whispered excitedly to him. The little boy, timid at first, soon entered into Doby's plan. Together they sidled up to her and secretly got her ear.
She was interested and pleased. She praised their scheme. "Bright as a button," she considered it.
In the settler's dooryard, with the full July moon shining down upon them, the guests formed two opposing lines of a dozen or so of people on each "side," and made ready for the spelling-match.
'Twas "light as day" they all declared; an idle hour for a bit of fun after a hard day's work.
In the deep shadow of the door-jamb, where no one could see him, stood the little boy from Kentucky. When it was time to begin he shut his eyes and, forgetting everything else, he looked into the book of his trained memory.
Beginning at top of the left-hand column on page one, he pronounced aloud, in a firm childish treble, all the words, one after another, in that column.
The two lines, or "sides," of guests, as they had been "chosen up" by their leaders, "took turns," one person at a time, in spelling the words as the little boy gave them out.
The schoolma'am acted as judge. She decided, "C'rect," if the speller got his word right. "Next," she called, if the wrong letters were used.
Beginning at the second column, the little boy pronounced its words in the same way; then he took the third column; then the fourth. The ones who missed the words he gave were "spelled down" and had to take their seats. Slowly the stools and stumps in the yard filled with faulty scholars.