The laugh was turned. The boy with red hair now plucked up courage and said, “The equator is an imaginary line. There is nothing to get over.”
“Good,” said the committee man. “You are the kind of boy I thought you were. Now, don’t forget that the equator isn’t the only difficulty in the world that you will find to be imaginary when you come to it. Good-bye.”
Another visitor told interesting stories about the little red schoolhouse that he attended as a boy, about getting out of bed before light cold winter mornings to help with the farm work before he went to school; of ploughing his way through snowdrifts, of making hay and digging potatoes and threshing grain, of working all day in the hot sun.
“Now, boys,” he said at the close, “I have a secret to tell you. You think it’s rather hard—don’t you?—to be called at eight o’clock in the morning, eat breakfast, and get to school by nine? Well, the secret is that while you are making yourselves comfortable the country boys are making themselves ready to come here to the city a few years from now to take your places. I wonder what you are going to do about it. You want those good places, and there is just one way by which you can hold on to them. It is this, ‘Work hard and don’t grumble.’”
Another committee man talked about perseverance. At the end of his little address he said:
“We have been talking about perseverance, and now I am going to ask you to do something that will make you remember this talk as long as you live. I want you to sing ‘Go on, go on, go on, go on,’ to the tune of ‘Auld Lang Syne.’”
It was sung, and there is no question that it was remembered.
CHAPTER XVII
THE HIGH SCHOOL EXAMINATIONS
One day at the beginning of Ella’s second year in the First Room, the superintendent came to the school and brought with him a stranger, a quiet gentleman with a pleasant smile.
“Do you suppose that is the one?” was the question signaled from one to another.