"I tell you if I don't feel like cutting up!" said Gypsy, on the way to school. Gypsy didn't look unlike "cutting up" either, walking along there with her satchel swung over her left shoulder, her turban set all askew on her bright, black hair, her cheeks flushed from the jumping of fences and running of races that had been going on since she left the house, and that saucy twinkle in her eyes. Joy was always somewhat more demure, but she looked, too, that morning, as if she were quite as ready to have a good time as any other girl.
"Do you know," said Gypsy, confidentially, as they went up the schoolhouse steps, "I feel precisely as if I should make Miss Cardrew a great deal of trouble to-day; don't you?"
"What does she do to you if you do?"
"Oh, sometimes she keeps you after school, and then again she tells Mr. Guernsey, and then there are the bad marks. Miss Melville—she's my old teacher that married Mr. Hallam, she was just silly enough!—well, she used to just look at you, and never open her lips, and I guess you wished you hadn't pretty quick."
It was very early yet, but quite a crowd was gathered in the schoolhouse, as was the fashion on cool mornings. The boys were stamping noisily over the desks, and grouped about the stove in No. 1. No. 1. was the large room where the whole school gathered for prayer. A few of the girls were there—girls who laughed rudely and talked loudly, none of them Gypsy's friends. Tom never liked to have Gypsy linger about in No. 1, before or after school hours; he said it was not the place for her, and Tom was there that morning, knotting his handsome brows up into a very decided frown, when he saw her in the doorway, with Joy peeping over her shoulder. So Gypsy—somewhat reluctantly, it must be confessed, for the boys seemed to be having a good time, and with boys' good times she had a most unconquerable sympathy—went up with Joy into Miss Cardrew's recitation room. Nobody was there. A great, empty schoolroom, with its rows of silent seats and closed desks, with power to roam whithersoever you will, and do whatsoever you choose, is a great temptation. The girls ran over the desks, and looked into the desks, jumped over the settees, and knocked down the settees, put out the fire and built it up again, from the pure luxury of doing what they wanted to, in a place where they usually had to do what they didn't want to. They sat in Miss Cardrew's chair, and peeped into her desk; they ate apples and snapped peanut shells on the very platform where sat the spectacled and ogre-eyed committee on examination days; they drew all manner of pictures of funny old women without any head, and old men without any feet, on the awful blackboard, and played "tag" round the globes. Then they stopped for want of breath.
"I wish there were something to do," sighed Gypsy; "something real splendid and funny."
"I knew a girl once, and she drew a picture of the teacher on the board in green chalk," suggested Joy; "only she lost her recess for a whole week after it."
"That wouldn't do. Besides, pictures are too common; everybody does those. Boys put pins in the seats, and cut off the legs of the teacher's chair, and all that. I don't know as I care to tumble Miss Cardrew over—wouldn't she look funny, though!—'cause mother wouldn't like it. Couldn't we make the stove smoke, or put pepper in the desks, or—let me see."