Ella, a little schoolgirl of the sixties

by Eva March Tappan

Cora was the oldest of the little group. There were six rooms in the school building, and she was in Number Two, the next to the highest. As they drew near to the schoolhouse, Cora began to give the new pupil some good advice.

“The principal thinks you don’t know anything if you can’t do examples,” she said, “and he’ll give you some awfully hard ones. Girls that come here from private schools don’t know very much, and you’ll probably be put in the Sixth Room. If you work hard, you can be promoted, maybe before the end of the year.”

Ella began to feel so humble that she never thought of saying, “I can do cube root, and you are only in denominate numbers,” and they went silently up the stairs.

“That’s the room,” said Cora. “That’s the principal sitting at the large desk, and there is the assistant at the smaller one.”

Ella wished that Cora would go in with her, but the older girl went off to her own room, and Ella stood on the threshold, a rather shy but exceedingly expectant little girl. Fortunately the assistant looked up and came to her.

“This is Ella, I am sure,” she said. “I know your mother, and I am glad to have her little daughter in the school.”

Then she introduced Ella to the principal. The girls and boys were all afraid of him, and when Ella looked fearlessly up into his face as if he was an old friend, and laid her hand in his, he really felt a little awkward. He was not used to being treated in that way by children.

“After the opening exercises we will see what you can do,” he said. He motioned her to a chair just beyond the farther end of the platform, near that of the pleasant assistant, and Ella seated herself, so radiantly happy that she had no dread of even the hard examples that were to come.

She looked about the room. It had many windows, and it seemed to her enormously large. Blackboards ran around the four sides wherever the windows and doors would permit, and on these blackboards were maps and examples. Best of all, there were twenty-four desks—she counted them over and over—and at each desk sat two girls or two boys, as the case might be.

None of them paid the least attention to her, for this was the highest class in the building. They would go to the high school in the spring, and what did they care about a small newcomer who might for all they knew, be condemned to the Sixth Room, or even be sent to the intermediate school a little way off? They were only two or three years older than Ella, but two or three years count for a great length of time when one is not yet twelve, and she looked at them with a deference that she had never felt for any grown-up. Grown-ups belonged to a queer world of their own. They had different notions and different ways of looking at things; but these boys and girls, venerable as they were by age and position, were nevertheless of her own world, and could be judged by standards that she could understand.