It was a tall class, and it was provided with leather-covered English Readers. One of the best readers in the class was a Miss Roby, a girl of some fifteen years of age, whom young Lincoln greatly liked, and whom he had once helped at a spelling match, by putting his finger on his eye (i) when she had spelled defied with a y. This girl read a selection with real pathos.
"That gal reads well," said Blue-nose Crawford, or Josiah Crawford, as he should be called. "She ought to keep school. We're goin' to need teachers in Indiana. People are comin' fast."
Miss Roby colored. She had indeed won a triumph of which every pupil of Spencer County might be proud.
"Now, Nathaniel, let's hear you read. You're a strappin' feller, and you ought not to be outread by a gal."
Nathaniel raised his book so as to hide his face, like one near-sighted. He spread his legs apart, and stood like a drum-major awaiting a word of command.
"You may read Section V in poetry," said Mr. Crawford, the teacher. "Verses supposed to be written by Alexander Selkirk. Speak up loud, and mind your pauses."
He did.
"I am monarch of all I survey," he began, in a tone of vocal thunder. Then he made a pause, a very long one. Josiah Crawford turned around in great surprise; and Aunt Olive planted the chair in which she had been sitting at a different angle, so that she could scrutinize the reader.
The monarch of all he surveyed, which in the case of the boy was only one page of the English Reader, was diligently spelling out the next line, which he proceeded to pronounce like one long word with surprising velocity:
"My-right-there-is-none-to-dispute."