Miss Agatha Merrit went to her desk and sat down. "Today," she said, "we will learn about being afraid. It is known that ninety percent of all things that people fear will not harm them. I know of big strong men afraid of insects and many women are dreadfully frightened of mice."
Peter Manton, Junior, raised his hand and said: "My father built a Better Mousetrap," he announced irrelevantly.
Miss Agatha Merrit was annoyed at the sidetracking, but young Manton's father was becoming a financial force in the community and she felt it unwise to ignore the comment. "I understand that the world is starting to beat a path to your door," she said, completing the old platitude. "But we're speaking of fear, not mice."
"You're not afraid of mice?" insisted young Peter.
"I can't say that I like them," said Miss Agatha Merrit. "Though I feel that the mouse is more frightened of me than I could possibly be of it. After all, I am quite a bit larger and more capable than a mouse—"
Miss Agatha Merrit opened the drawer of her desk but was prevented from looking in.
The next several minutes are not describable. Not in any sort of chronological order because everything happened at once. Miss Agatha Merrit headed for the chandelier and got as far as the top of her chair which somehow arrived on the top of the table. Mice boiled out of the desk drawer and spread in a wave across the desk and across the floor. In a ragged wave front, the third-grade girls found the tops of their desks and the third-grade boys yelped in amusement and started to corral the mice. By the time the room was cleaned up an hour later, the boys had thirty-four mice in a wastebasket covered by a small drawing board, four mice had escaped down holes in the woodwork, seven had gone out under the door, and three were trying to find their way out of nine-year-old pockets.
Miss Agatha Merrit never did learn the name of the ringleader of that prank. She strongly suspected Peter Junior who was at best an imaginative child with a clever mind and few inhibitions. What bothered her most was that the trick was repeated.
There were three drawers in her desk. Young Peter Manton brought, on the following morning, one of his father's Better Mousetraps. She placed it in the drawer that had been "salted" with mice the day before, but the pranksters used the second drawer that night. Carefully she concealed the trap in the third drawer on the following night, and the mice turned up in the top drawer again.
It became a race. Whether the problem would be solved before Miss Agatha Merrit became a quivering nervous wreck.