There were several pieces of driftwood smooth enough to do for slates, and one or two bits of flat stones also. Clamshells were useful. They had quite a number of these, as big as saucers, that they had used as dishes. Marian took them now and made school readers of them. With the lead-pencil she wrote lessons on them, Mother Goose verses, bits of poetry that did not have too many big words in them, remembered proverbs, and little stories. When the three older children could read and spell all the words in them, she washed them out and wrote another lesson.

Arithmetic was taught by means of the blackboard and little shells, stones, and seeds. Delbert always did his figuring on the hearthstone. He would stretch out on his stomach and elbows, his chin in his hands, and his feet kicking at all angles.

The other children had to give him a wide berth or they got all kinds of cracks. Jennie complained that she could not think lying down, so she always used the blackboard. Esther used it too, not because her brain would not work horizontally, but because when Delbert had the hearth there was no room for any one else there, and he made his figures as big as all out-of-doors anyway. After all, mental arithmetic was more satisfactory, and Marian drilled them pretty well in that.

The paper-tree proved a treasure to them. It is, I think, in some respects a distant cousin of the birch. At any rate, its bark can be peeled off in the same way, only it is much thinner—of paperlike thickness, or thinness rather—and partially transparent. When she could get good pieces of this, Marian never failed to acquire them, and she made books of it, clumsy, of course, but serving a little better than the clamshells.

She was constantly experimenting for ink, testing every juice she came across that seemed at all likely. Pens she could make, as her ancestors had before her, of big quills. Her little penknife had never been much used except to whittle out toys for Christmas, and it was just the thing to make quill pens with.

Fortunately, Delbert and the girls were eager to learn. They did not want to be behind their mates when they got back to them, and as they were all three pretty bright, Marian’s task was much easier than it would otherwise have been.

But Davie was not over anxious to spend time on what seemed to him so useless. He was more backward than either of the others, too, and with him Marian had need of the most loving patience, also of ingenuity in thinking up ways to get him interested. Fortunately, she was patient, and, moreover, loved the little fellow so fervently that she would have developed patience even had she been naturally devoid of it.

CHAPTER IX
DAVIE’S PANAL HUNT: AND WHAT CAME OF IT

Davie was really getting to be quite a chunk of a boy. He was different from Delbert,—more square and solid of build, of quieter and calmer temperament too, slower in his motions and also in his thought and speech. In features he resembled Esther more than any of the others.