Several almost ruined their new shoes by kicking him, while others had pelted him with stones, and still others, in face of the warning printed in big letters, had haggled him dreadfully with their jack-knives.
It was a warm summer morning and most of the boys not only were bare-footed, but had their trousers rolled above their knees, and, generally, were without coat or vest.
"To-morrow afternoon the show will be here," said Sammy McClay, smacking his lips and shaking his head as though he tasted a luscious morsel, "and I'm going."
"How are you going," asked Joe Hunt, sarcastically, "when your father said he wouldn't give you the money?"
"Never you mind," was the answer, with another significant shake of the head. "I'm goin'—that's all."
"Goin' to try and crawl under the tent. I know. But you can't do it. You'll get a whack from the whip of the man that's watching that you'll feel for six weeks. Don't I know—'cause, didn't I try it?"
"I wouldn't be such a dunce as you; you got half way under the tent and then stuck fast, so you couldn't go backward or forward, and you begun to yell so you like to broke up the performance, and when the man come along why he had the best chance in the world to cowhide you, and he did it. I think I know a little better than that."
At this moment, Mr. Abijah McCurtis, the school teacher in the little stone school-house a hundred yards away, solemnly lifted his spectacles from his nose to his forehead, and grasping the handle of his large cracked bell walked to the door and swayed it vigorously for a minute or so.
This was the regular summons for the boys and girls to enter school, and he had sent forth the unmusical clangor, summer and winter, for a full two-score years.