Dawn of the Morning

by Grace Livingston Hill

Dawn went back to the Golden Swan that evening tired but triumphant. She had had a most successful session of school, and she knew it. She felt the victor's blood running wildly through her veins, and longed to have the minister know how well she had succeeded.

The teaching part had not troubled her in the least. Fresh from school-books, blest with a love of study and a gift for imparting knowledge, she entered into the work with a zest. The problem of discipline, which had bade fair in the morning to shipwreck her hopes, had resolved itself into a very simple matter since she had conquered the school leader. It puzzled her a little to know just how she had done it, and why he had succumbed so easily, yet she felt a pleasant elation in recognizing the power she had over him. As she lay in her little room, after the candle was out that night, she pondered it, and resolved to try to help Daniel to be a fine fellow. Perhaps some day he would grow to be something like Charles. He never could be as fine and noble, of course, for he was a rough boy, uncultured and ignorant; but he had nice eyes, and he might develop good qualities if he were helped. Dawn would have been horrified if she could have known that instead of loafing with the men at the grocery, where he usually spent his evenings, Daniel was at that moment standing in the dark of the kitchen porch of his home, behind the cool morning-glory vines, looking out at the stars and thinking with wonder of the delight it had been to have her soft hands strike his face, and her dainty personality flash down upon him, even in her beautiful wrath.

Daniel Butterworth was only a boy yet, but new thoughts were stirring in his heart, and an absorbing admiration for her had entered into his soul to stay. Hitherto he had been a big, good-natured, rollicking animal. His mind had been upon either fun or practical matters, never upon books. He had not been taught to think. His surroundings had been rough, easy-going, and practical. Nothing beautiful had ever touched him before, yet his soul had responded quickly now that it had come, and in one brief day Daniel seemed to have grown beyond his seventeen years and to have come suddenly face to face with manhood.

And the cause of his sudden awakening had been the new teacher's hands, so small and soft, and yet so strong. As he thought about them, they seemed to have been made of finer stuff than most women's hands; to have been tinted like the inner leaf of a half-blown rose, and to have borne a subtle perfume upon his senses. How he could have seen their color when the "rose-leaves" were smiting stinging blows upon his closed eyes, he did not stop to reason. He leaned his face against a great morning-glory leaf in the darkness, and its coolness against his fevered cheeks reminded him of her hands, and thrilled him in a way he did not understand. He looked up at the stars, between the strings on which the morning-glories twined, and wondered at himself, and thrilled again with a solemn joy. But all he knew was that he liked the new teacher, and meant to study hard, if that would please her, and that he would lick any boy that dared molest her or disturb her gentle rule. So much the little hands had accomplished in their first quick, decisive battle.

Then Daniel kicked off his boots noisily and tiptoed up the creaking stairs to his attic chamber, to make his mother think he had been at the village store, as usual. Not for the world would he have her know he had spent the evening among the kitchen morning-glories, thinking about a girl! And she a schoolmarm at that! He blushed deeply in the darkness at the thought.

After that first day of getting acquainted with her scholars, and finding out who were in the various classes, Dawn fashioned her school on the model of Friend Ruth's as nearly as was consistent with existing circumstances. The rules she laid down were stricter than the village school had ever known before, and went more into detail. A code of ethics was gradually formed among the scholars, who followed the lead of Daniel Butterworth and succumbed to the leadership of the new teacher. Her beauty and her youth combined to make both boys and girls fall victims to her charm. They fairly worshipped at her shrine, and went long pilgrimages after berries or rare flowers and ferns, that they might be rewarded with the flash of gratitude in her lovely eyes. They suffered torments in refraining from their usual mischief, that they might escape the flash of steel from those same eyes, for once that was felt, they had no desire to re-experience it. It became the fashion to treat her as a sort of queen, and Dawn was very gracious to her subjects, though always masterful. She smiled upon their offerings impartially, even upon Bug Higginson's small sister's donation of moistly withered dandelions. Yet when she discovered some deviation from the laws she had laid down, she was severity itself, almost flying into a passion with them, outraged goodness in her eyes, and impulsive intensity in her every motion. At such times she seemed to have a special gift of speech, coming directly to the point and saying the things that would most cut the culprit.

Once behind a stump fence in the woods she came upon a row of her boys placidly smoking corn-cob pipes, in imitation of the village loafers—or of their respected fathers, each of whom had threatened dire things to his offspring if he was ever caught at the practice. Her horror and disgust quickly blazed into words, until every boy wished that a hole would open in the ground wide enough to swallow him for a little while.

Dawn had no convictions or principles about the matter. She was moved by an innate dislike of the practice, intensified by the fact that Harrington Winthrop had once smoked in her company while walking with her in the woods, and had never even asked permission. The smell of tobacco smoke ever after gave her a sickening sense of dislike.

The boys threw their pipes away, and Daniel Butterworth, rising from the root of the tree on which he had been seated, commanded:

"Fellers, if she don't like it, we quit! D'ye understand? We quit entirely. I'll thrash any boy that breaks the rule."