The eventful day came, with blue-birds in the glimmering timber, and a blue sky over all. People came from a distance to attend the examination, and were surprised to find the school-house changed into a green bower.
Abraham as a Peace-maker.
The afternoon session had been assigned to receiving company, and the pupils awaited the guests with trembling expectation. It was a warm day, and the oiled paper that served for panes of glass in the windows had been pushed aside to admit the air and make an outlook, and the door had been left open. The first to arrive was Jasper. The school saw him coming; but he looked so kindly, benevolent, and patriarchal, that the boys and girls did not stand greatly in awe of him. They seemed to feel instinctively that he was their friend and was with them. But a different feeling came over them when 'Squire Gentry, of Gentryville, came cantering on a horse that looked like a war-charger. 'Squire Gentry was a great man in those parts, and filled a continental space in their young minds. The faces of all the scholars were turned silently and deferently to their books when the 'Squire banged with his whip-handle on the door. Aunt Olive was next seen coming down the timber. She was dressed in a manner to cause solicitude and trepidation. She wore knit mits, had a lofty poke bonnet, and a "checkered" gown gay enough for a valance, and, although it was yet very early spring, she carried a parasol over her head. There was deep interest in the books as her form also darkened the festooned door.
Then the pupils breathed freer. But only for a moment. Sarah Lincoln, Abraham's sister, looked out of the window, and beheld a sight which she was not slow to communicate.
"Abe," she whispered, "look there!"
"Blue-nose Crawford," whispered the tall boy, "as I live!"
In a few moments the school was all eyes and mouths. Blue-nose Crawford bore the reputation of being a very hard taskmaster, and of holding to the view that severe discipline was one of the virtues that wisdom ought to visit upon the youth. He once lent to Abraham Lincoln Weems's "Life of Washington." The boy read it with absorbing interest, but there came a driving storm, and the rain ran in the night through the walls of the log-cabin and wet and warped the cover of the book. Blue-nose Crawford charged young Lincoln seventy-five cents for the damage done to the book. "Abe," as he was called, worked three days, at twenty-five cents a day, pulling fodder, to pay the fine. He said, long after this hard incident, that he did his work well, and that, although his feelings were injured, he did not leave so much as a strip of fodder in the field.
"The class in reading may take their places," said Andrew Crawford.