Up went Hattie’s hand as if worked by a spring. “Miss Kelsey, mother’s making soap, and she told me to come home right away as soon as school was out to tend the baby.”
It was natural, though perhaps not wise, for Miss Kelsey to lose patience at this point.
“Then,” said she, “you may go immediately, and mind you run every step of the way. Well, Patty Curtis, what is your mother doing that you cannot stay to sweep?”
Now, Patty had been trying during all of the previous dialogue to think if there was not something that her mother might possibly want her to do after school, by which she might escape the sweeping, but all in vain, for Patty’s mother was one of the women who “never want children bothering around about the work,” and as Patty was too conscientious to invent an excuse, as some children would have done, she had no answer for Miss Kelsey’s question except a rather sulky, “Nothing that I know of, ma’am.”
“Then you and Aggie Bentley take the brooms when the others are gone,” said Miss Kelsey, as she tapped the bell.
Aggie Bentley was one of the pleasantest little girls in the world; when appointed to sweep she did not think of trying to evade the duty, it was enough for her that her teacher had asked her to do it, and she took the broom so cheerfully and went to work with such a vim that Patty was shamed out of her unwillingness, and soon was swinging the broom as briskly and as awkwardly as was Aggie. Still it was not a pleasant task, and when she came out of the school-room, coughing, sneezing, and wiping the dust out of her eyes, she found words for her disgust:
“Ugh! Nasty work! I’m glad there’s thirty-four more to sweep before it comes our turn again. Let’s see, thirty-four, two at a time, that’s seventeen days. Nearly a month before we’ll have to sweep again, Aggie!”
But Patty was doomed to disappointment, for at the moment she was making this clearly expressed calculation, Miss Kelsey was also giving the sweeping question serious thought.
“It is going to be a hard matter to persuade these children to do the sweeping,” thought she. “I suppose most of the mothers can find something for them to do, and the little rogues who have always loitered and played half an hour or more on their way home, will come to-morrow with a fine assortment of excuses, all to the effect that they must be at home immediately after school. I think I had better change the plan and make the sweeping a punishment for whispering. They will not care to tell their parents that they are detained for misdemeanors, and it will put a check on the whispering too.”
So the next morning as soon as school opened she told the pupils she should appoint to the sweeping, that night, the first two that she should see whispering.