Lyddy heard her and said quickly, her expression very decided indeed:
“We’re not going–yet. Let us stay until the finish.”
“Yes, by jove!” muttered Harris. “I’d just like to see what these Rubes would dare do!”
But girls are not like boys–at least, some girls are not. They won’t fight fair.
The Hillcrest party need not have expected an attack in any way that could be openly answered–no, indeed. But they did not escape.
Mr. Somers rang his desk bell at last and called the company to order. After a song from the school song-book, in which everybody joined, the “Club Chronicles” were announced.
This “history”–being mainly hits on what had happened in the community since the last meeting of the Temperance Club–was very popular. Mayme Lowry was a more than ordinarily bright girl, and had a gift for composition. It was whispered that she wrote the “Pounder’s Brook Items” for the Bridleburg Weekly Clarion.
Miss Lowry rose and unfolded her manuscript. It was written in a somewhat irreverent imitation of the scriptural “Chronicles;” but that seemed to please the young folks here gathered all the more. She began:
“And it came to pass in the reign of King Westerville Somers, who was likewise a seer and a prophet, and in the fourth month of the second year of his reign over the Pounder’s School District, that a certain youth whose name rhymes with ‘hitch it,’ hitched himself to the apron-strings of a maid, who was at that time sojourning at the top of the hill–and was hitched so tight that you couldn’t have pried the two apart with a crowbar!”
“Oh, by cracky!” gasped the suddenly ruddy-faced Lucas. “What a wallop!”