“Oh, I haven’t it. You can do it while the others are at work”—not an especially easy thing for a child of twelve to do, particularly as he knew well that the principal would look in every little while to make sure that everything was going on in orderly fashion.
Hearing one another’s lessons was common, and correcting one another’s papers; but Ella had an experience in teaching that went far beyond this. One day the principal called her and said,
“Miss Ella—Ella—there’s a boy in the office who says he never understood why you invert the divisor. I want you to go in and explain it to him.”
In a minute Ella came back and said,
“There is a man in there, but there isn’t any boy.”
“Well, boy—man—it is all the same. Just go back and explain it to him as if he was a small boy.”
Ella’s seminary experiences came in play. She had been so used to being counted with grown-ups when she was a member of the “Literary and Scientific Course” that she did not feel the least bit embarrassed or awkward, but explained and cut up an apple to illustrate as easily and naturally as if the strange man had been the boy whom she was expecting to find.
“Did he understand?” asked the principal when she returned to the schoolroom.
“He said he did,” Ella replied.
“I should think he did,” the principal said to Ella’s mother afterwards. “He has been teaching—you can guess how well—somewhere in the backwoods, and he is trying to learn a little something before he goes back. He said he never understood before why you invert the divisor, but I think he will always remember now.”