And Jim? He found himself hard to control that night. So much so that it was after midnight before he had finished work on a plan for a cooperative creamery.
“The boys can be given work in helping to operate it,” he wrote on a tablet, “which, in connection with the labor performed by the teacher, will greatly reduce the expense of operation. A skilled butter-maker, with slender white hands”—but he erased this last clause and retired.
CHAPTER XII
FACING TRIAL
A distinct sensation ran through the Woodruff school, but the schoolmaster and a group of five big boys and three girls engaged in a very unclasslike conference in the back of the room were all unconscious of it. The geography classes had recited, and the language work was on. Those too small for these studies were playing a game under the leadership of Jinnie Simms, who had been promoted to the position of weed-seed monitor.
The game was forfeits. Each child had been encouraged to bring some sort of weed from the winter fields—preferably one the seed of which still clung to the dried receptacles—but anyhow, a weed. Some pupils had brought merely empty tassels, some bare stalks, and some seeds which they had winnowed from the grain in their father’s bins; and with them they played forfeits. They counted out by the “arey, Ira, ickery an’” method, and somebody was “It.” Then, in order, they presented to him a seed, stalk or head of a weed, and if the one who was It could tell the name of the weed, the child who brought the specimen became It, and the name was written on slates or tablets, and the new It told where the weed or seed was collected. If any pupil brought in a specimen the name of which he himself could not correctly give, he paid a forfeit. If a specimen was brought in not found in the school cabinet—which was coming to contain a considerable collection—it was placed there, and the task allotted to the best penman in the school to write its proper label. All this caused excitement, and not a little buzz—but it ceased when the county superintendent entered the room.
For it was after the first of January, and Jennie was visiting the Woodruff school.
The group in the back of the room went on with its conference, oblivious of the entrance of Superintendent Jennie. Their work was rather absorbing, being no more nor less than the compilation of the figures of a cow census of the district.