Both the little girls looked forward with pleasure to the recitation in history on the following day, but they were disappointed, for just before the class was to be called, visitors came in and asked especially if they might hear one of the classes in reading.
There were of course more visitors to the First Room than to the lower grades. One was the superintendent of schools. He used to drop in informally, chat a little in a friendly fashion, and then, when the boys and girls were quite at their ease, he would examine a class or two, look at the maps that had been drawn, make a note, both aloud and in his notebook, of anything that he especially liked, and say good-bye quite as if he had been visiting at their homes.
Members of the school committee had the privilege of making speeches to the pupils. If a man could win a place on this committee, he could, even if he had no talent for public speaking, enjoy all the rewards of eloquence, for he was sure of an audience who would hang upon his words and whose faces would express genuine regret when his speech was evidently drawing to a close.
It was Ella who let the secret out. Once after there had been an address that was both long and dull, the assistant said to her at recess:
“I was pleased to see how attentive you were to our visitor this morning. That was real courtesy.”
“I wanted him to keep on talking,” Ella replied.
“Did you?” questioned the assistant, with a note of surprise that would slip into her voice, quite against her intentions.
“Yes, because if he had talked only ten minutes longer, it would have been too late to have any geography recitation, and I didn’t know the lesson so very well,” replied Ella serenely. “I tried to look just as interested as I possibly could, so he would keep on talking.”
Even if the committee men were not all the most eloquent of public speakers, they rarely failed to have something definite to say and to say it in a way that would make it “stick,” which after all is about as much as any orator can hope to accomplish. One of them brought a stranger with him one day, who asked to see the drawing of maps on the blackboard from memory.
“Very well,” said the principal. “Class in geography.—What is your State?” he asked the guest.