The excitement spread over the whole village. Doctor Lanham talked about it, and the ministers, and the lawyers, and the loafers in the stores, and the people who came to the post-office for their letters. Of course, it broke out furiously in the “Maternal Association,” a meeting of mothers held at the house of one of the ministers.
“Mr. Ball can do every sum in the arithmetic,” urged Mrs. Weathervane.
“He’s a master hand at figures, they do say,” said Mother Brownson.
“Yes,” said Mrs. Dudley, “I don’t doubt it. Jack’s back is covered with figures of Mr. Ball’s making. For my part, I should rather have a master that did his figuring on a slate.”
Susan Lanham got hold of this retort, and took pains that it should be known all over the village.
When Greenbank once gets waked up on any question, it never goes to sleep until that particular question is settled. But it doesn’t wake up more than once or twice in twenty years. Most of the time it is only talking in its sleep. Now that Greenbank had its eyes open for a little time, it was surprised to see that while the cities along the river had all adopted graded schools,—de-graded schools, as they were called by the people opposed to them,—and while even the little villages in the hill country had younger and more enlightened teachers, the county-town of Greenbank had made no advance. It employed yet, under the rule of President Fillmore, the same hard old stick of a master that had beaten the boys in the log school-house in the days of John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. But, now it was awake, Greenbank kept its eyes open on the school question. The boys wrote on the fences, in chalk:
DOWN WITH OLD BAWL!
and thought the bad spelling of the name a good joke, while men and women began to talk about getting a new master.
Will Riley and Ben Berry had the hardest time. For the most part they stayed at home during the excitement, only slinking out in the evening. The boys nicknamed them “Gunpowder cowards,” and wrote the words on the fences. Even the loafers about the street asked them whether Old Ball had given them that whipping yet, and how they liked “powder and Ball.”