Ella pondered a minute, then she said: “It’s because there isn’t any way to get the better of it. If I have arithmetic to do, I can work hard and then I can say, ‘There, you old thing, I’ve done you in half the time you wanted me to spend, and now Ponto and I are going to the lake in spite of you.’ But no matter how hard I practice, an hour is always an hour, and there isn’t any way to make it shorter.”
Of course Ella hated to count. Bribes were offered. “My music teacher said that if I would count three weeks without stopping, she would give me a piece,” Ella wrote in her little diary. In spite of the promised “piece,” however, “One, two, three, four,” became as tiresome as the multiplication table, and at length she invented a way to make the time pass; she played very loud with one hand and at the same time patted Ponto with the other.
She felt a little guilty when her music teacher said: “I heard you practicing two or three measures over and over this morning, Ella, and I thought what a good lesson you were going to have to-morrow.”
Ella did not reply, and she forgot to listen to see whether her heart would make any speeches to her. She didn’t like practicing, and she didn’t, and when she heard of remarkable little girls no older than she who had taken only twelve lessons and could play “two pieces” already, she did not care very much that she could play only one. Neither did Ponto.
Ella had a reason for not caring. She firmly expected that some day, even without that wearisome “One, two, three, four,” she would play as well as the little girl with two pieces, perhaps even as well as her teacher. It was all very simple and very logical. The teacher wore a ring with a bright red stone in it and was able to play; by and by she would have a ring with a bright red stone, and then of course she would be able to play. Ella knew that the grown-ups would laugh at her if she told them her fancy, so she only whispered it into Ponto’s ear. Dogs could understand, but grown-ups could not.
Like most children, Ella was younger than her years in some ways and older in others. She could cherish a belief in the efficacy of a ring to give her musical ability, and she could sit in a class with “ladies and gentlemen” more than twice her age without a thought of this being anything remarkable. Of course she knew that the children in the village went to school with boys and girls of their own years; but this was nothing; they did one thing and she did another, that was all. She even took it as a matter of course when in the “Institute Reporter,” the little four-page sheet that glorified the seminary with printers’ ink, she saw her own name among the other “ladies.” It had, too, a special mark of honor in the shape of an asterisk indicating that she was “In studies of the English and Classical graduating course.” To be sure, no one of her studies was classical, and she was many years removed from graduation, but it made one more name on the list.
As to the English, she really wrote with some degree of correctness because she had never seen writings that were incorrect, and she was quite aghast when she first heard the correction of compositions in class. She wrote to her uncle, “I can’t stop for dates. I want to tell you what funny compositions some of the scholars write. One great boy wrote his and commenced every word with a capital letter. I have not quite got to doing that.” Ella thoroughly enjoyed making tiny blankbooks and composing equally tiny stories carefully adjusted to the little pages. She even manufactured a paper for children, composing, editing, and copying it all herself.
Every Monday evening the “Lyceum” was held, an exercise which was expected to develop the literary ability of the students. Ella had joined it as a matter of course, and when called on for a recitation, she had given “Over the River” in her best style. When the second call came, she decided, possibly with a latent instinct for advertising, to read the first number of her paper. This was not exactly an innovation, for the “Lyceum” already rejoiced in a paper called “The Alpha.”
Ella’s paper was named “Little Pearls.” How the “ladies and gentlemen” and the august faculty kept their faces straight during its presentation is a mystery. It contained a few conundrums, whose answers were promised “in our next,” but otherwise it was carefully modeled on the weekly paper of the Sunday school. There were letters from children with the patronizing comments of the editor; there was an original story or two; and the sheet ended with the tragic tale, drawn from the little editor’s own experience, of a tiny fish, caught and brought home from the lake. I fear that the writer had never been properly trained in “nature study,” for she stated that the fish jumped out of the water and was found “lying upon its back,” dead, and she declared, “although a cat has nine lives, a fish has only one, and therefore it always stayed dead forever after.” Whether this literary production lengthened the list of subscribers, no one can say; but certainly Ella’s minute cash account showed no marked increase of income on that date.