“What is the matter with James, mother? What makes him look so downcast?” said Bertie.
“Your father has told him he must go to school, and he feels bad about it, I suppose.”
Bertie ran up stairs and told James not to feel bad about going to school, for the master was a real kind man, and he was going to hear him recite there just as he did at home. James’ ideas of school were very vague; he only knew that he was going among a crowd of strange boys to be exposed to criticism, and put under a new master, but much comforted by what Bertie told him, he composed himself and went to sleep.
The morning school was to begin, the boys took an early start, thus giving James an opportunity to view the schoolhouse. It was a log building of the rudest kind, and nearly a hundred years old. It had remained without alteration, except receiving a shingle roof and glazed windows. The walls were chestnut logs of the largest size, save a few near the top, and the crevices between them were stuffed with clay, and moss and hemlock brush had been recently piled to the windows around the whole building, for the sake of warmth. The door was of plank with wooden hinges and latch.
It was situated in a singularly wild and rugged spot, on a high ridge of broken land, over the surface of which huge boulders and precipices alternated with abrupt hills and swales of moderate extent, the whole region heavily timbered with oak, chestnut, and beech.
The ancient building seemed to have appropriated to itself the only level spot in the vicinity, a little green plot, though of small extent.
It was bounded on the northwest by a precipice that rose perpendicularly above the roof of the schoolhouse that was built within a few feet of it. On the summit of this cliff were large beeches that thrust their gnarled roots into the interstices of the rock, and flung their branches over the ancient building. The main road was through a natural break in the ridge of rock, and beside it a pure spring of water supplied the wants of the school, and the necessities of travellers.
There lay in the mind of this apparently stolid lad, whose life hitherto had known neither childhood nor joyous youth, a keen susceptibility to impressions of the beautiful and majestic in nature. Through all those years of misery it had lain dormant and undeveloped, but of late the woods and fields had begun to have a strange fascination for him, he knew not why, and his happiest hours were spent while laboring alone in the forest. He had as yet seen nothing to compare in rugged grandeur and beauty with this, and the old schoolhouse was in such perfect keeping with its wild surroundings that it seemed to have grown there.
“Do let me look a little longer.”
This to Bertie, who was pulling him by the arm and saying,—“Come, let’s go into the schoolhouse. I want you to speak to Arthur and Elmer Nevins before the rest come; they are first-rate boys and live close by here, this land is on their farm. I want you to see Edward Conly, the master’s brother, too.”