"Boys, Mr. Clarke has sent me here to be your teacher to-day, but I am not prepared to teach the lesson, and I don't know the ways of the school. You will have to teach me, I guess. How many have learned the lesson? All of you?"
There seemed to be something remarkably fun-provoking in the question, for the boys were very merry over it.
"Dear me, how they do act!" thought Mabel. "What shall I do with them?" But she kept all signs of her dismay out of her face, and put the question to them individually.
Perry Morse "hadn't looked at it." Henry Trafton "had not been there in a good many weeks, and didn't know what the lesson was." Lewie Amesbury had learned it. Herbert Bradford and Duncan McNair had only looked it over a little.
"Very well, Lewie, then you are the one to lead off. The rest of us will open our Bibles and do the best we can with reading and looking out the references."
But it turned out that there was no Bible in the class, except Mabel's. Here was a new trouble—no lesson, and no books to refer to! The next expedient was for the teacher to read a paragraph, and request the class to repeat it in concert; but their attempt to do this created much merriment, and seemed to attract the attention of those around them; so that plan was abandoned, and she simply read over the whole lesson, and tried to give a paraphrase of it. Then to Lewie,—
"What struck you most in the lesson?"
At this Henry giggled and whispered.
"Say, Lewie, do you hit back when you are struck? Fighting ain't allowed here."
Lewie gave a reproving nudge at his neighbour's sides, and looked steadily at his boots. Evidently he had not learned the lesson with reference to ideas, and Mabel was obliged to make her own points, and, as she afterward said, they were too hastily whittled to be very pointed. Yet the time slipped away pleasantly, and Mabel's parting word was—