As the little girl sat down by her, munching fast on this provender, she asked: “What desk did you get?”
Elizabeth Ann thought for a moment, cuddling Eleanor up to her face. “I think it is the third from the front in the second row.” She wondered why Aunt Abigail cared. “Oh, I guess that’s your Uncle Henry’s desk. It’s the one his father had, too. Are there a couple of H. P.’s carved on it?”
Betsy nodded.
“His father carved the H. P. on the lid, so Henry had to put his inside. I remember the winter he put it there. It was the first season Mother let me wear real hoop skirts. I sat in the first seat on the third row.”
Betsy ate her apple more and more slowly, trying to take in what Aunt Abigail had said. Uncle Henry and his father—why Moses or Alexander the Great didn’t seem any further back in the mists of time to Elizabeth Ann than did Uncle Henry’s father! And to think he had been a little boy, right there at that desk! She stopped chewing altogether for a moment and stared into space. Although she was only nine years old, she was feeling a little of the same rapt wonder, the same astonished sense of the reality of the people who have gone before, which make a first visit to the Roman Forum such a thrilling event for grown-ups. That very desk!
After a moment she came to herself, and finding some apple still in her mouth, went on chewing meditatively. “Aunt Abigail,” she said, “how long ago was that?”
“Let’s see,” said the old woman, peeling apples with wonderful rapidity. “I was born in 1844. And I was six when I first went to school. That’s sixty-six years ago.”
Elizabeth Ann, like all little girls of nine, had very little notion how long sixty-six years might be. “Was George Washington alive then?” she asked.
The wrinkles around Aunt Abigail’s eyes deepened mirthfully, but she did not laugh as she answered, “No, that was long after he died, but the schoolhouse was there when he was alive.”
“It was!” said Betsy, staring, with her teeth set deep in an apple.