“And what is that, pray?”
“Well, you see, half the time it’s darker than a hat on the roads, with the trees growing over them and all. Some folks around here ain’t even got lanterns, and anyway, if they had, they wouldn’t want to go out such pitch black nights.”
“Then they could come on moonlight nights,” cried Mr. Rowantree triumphantly. “We’ll have a moonlight school, Sikes. Moonlight will be a sign and token that school has taken up. What do you say to that?”
“I say it’s just the very thing,” cried Dibblee Sikes. “Then my ma can come, can’t she? Why, she’s jest as knowing as she can be—keeps me laughing at her purty near all the time I’m home. She’s got more rules for cooking than anybody hereabouts, and she can remember the greatest songs—about fifty verses long, some of them be—about things that has happened in this here country. But she carries it all in her head. She can’t read, jest because she ain’t been taught. If she could read she’d be the smartest woman anywhere, almost.”
Mr. Rowantree was a man with his own faults, but for every fault he had a virtue, and now his eyes were alight like the boy’s.
“Right you are, Sikes,” he said. “And we’ll teach her. A moonlight school we shall have, and with the permission of Miss Carson and her friend, I will teach it. I’ve been a happy man, Sikes, but I haven’t been a particularly useful one. So now I’ll surprise myself by turning over a new leaf. I’m going to be useful, if teaching my neighbors what I know is—”
“Oh, Mr. Rowantree,” interrupted the boy, “I wisht school was over so I could run home and tell my ma. I know she’ll want to come, and she’ll make other folks want to come, too. You’d be real surprised the way my ma can get folks to do things.”
“No, I wouldn’t,” said Mr. Rowantree; “not if she’s like you, Sikes. You can get folk to do things, too. You’ve got me to take a job, and by Jove, I didn’t know it was in me to do such a thing.”
The laziest man in the community smiled at the red-headed boy, and the boy grinned back, and in doing so revealed three vacancies in the two rows of teeth. It was “tooth-dropping” time with him, and he was not beautiful.
The afternoon, it must be confessed, seemed rather tedious to Mr. Rowantree. He wondered where Azalea and Carin had found their patience. Nay, it took something more than patience to sow the seeds of knowledge in these uncultivated minds. Yet he had to admit, that though uncultivated, they were not rocky and sterile soil. On the contrary, beneath all their shyness, the children were wild to learn. Paralee was, of course, not present that day, so he missed the pleasure of instructing the one pupil who treated books as if they were food and she a starveling.