SCHOOL
A PURITAN SCHOOL-DAY
Peregrine fastened his long black cloak, and Patience smoothed her white apron and tied the strings of her close-fitting bonnet beneath her dimpled chin. The brother and sister crossed the threshold of the log house which was their home in old Plymouth, almost three hundred years ago, and started to walk across the corn fields and through a patch of woodland, lying between their house and the next cabin.
They were two little Puritan children, going to school.
They laughed and pointed happily to the full ears of corn as they crossed the fields. There would be a good harvest, they knew, and that meant plenty of hot corn-meal mush filling the big copper kettle that hung over their fireplace, and corn would fill the huge brick oven. But as Peregrine and Patience crept softly between the great pine trees of the wood, they clasped each other's hands more tightly, and started to see a red-winged bird dart out of the branches. "Suppose it had been the bright feather head-dress of an Indian," they whispered. One was very apt to meet Indians on the way to school in those old-time days.
The long distance was travelled in safety, though. Promptly at eight o'clock, the two little Puritans knocked at the door of a second log house and it was opened by their neighbor, Mistress Endicott. There was no school-bell, there were no desks and comfortable chairs and blackboards and picture books. Mistress Endicott had risen from her spinning wheel, that stood by the fireplace, to let in Peregrine and Patience, and a dozen other small boys and girls of Plymouth. There was no real schoolhouse as yet in Plymouth. Mistress Endicott kept house, and tended her garden, and taught all the children of the neighborhood as well.
There were long settles beside the fireplace and here the children seated themselves, Peregrine on one side, and Patience on the other, to study their lessons. They were given queer little books, called the New England Primer, in wooden covers, and having funny, tiny pictures for each letter of the alphabet, and beside each, a jingle. There were verses to be learned from the Bible, too. Patience held her primer up close to her nose and studied very diligently, but Peregrine's eyes wandered out of the window and toward the blue sky. He was thinking of a kite he planned to make when school was over.
"Class stand, and recite," Mistress Endicott said suddenly, stopping the whir of her spinning wheel only a moment to call the children, for industry and learning had to go on at the same time in those old days in the Colonies.
At once the boys and girls rose and stood in front of their teacher, the copper toes of their stout shoes placed exactly on a long crack in the bare floor. Then they read aloud, while Mistress Endicott's wheel whirred on. It sounded as if a hive of bees were humming in the schoolroom, but the good dame could listen and spin at the same time. She knew very well if a child made a mistake.