Nov. 15, 19—.
Dearest Winnebagos:
You don’t happen to know of anyone that would like to employ a good country schoolma’am for the rest of the term, do you? I’m fired; that is, I’ll wager all my earthly possessions that I will be at the next session of the Board. The prophet hath spoken truly; and you can’t make a silk-purse-carrying schoolmarm out of Katherine Adams.
This morning I woke up with a glouch, which is a combination of a gloom and a grouch, and worse than either. It didn’t improve it to have to go to school on such a crisp, cool, ten-mile-walk day and listen to Clarissa Butts stammer out a paragraph in the reader about vegetation around extinct volcanoes, and all the while trying to keep my eye on the rest of the pupils, who were not listening, but throwing spitballs at each other. The worst of it was I didn’t blame them a bit for not listening. Why on earth can’t they put something interesting into school readers? Even I, with my insatiable thirst for information, gagged on vegetation around extinct volcanoes. Clarissa’s paragraph drew to a halting close and finally stopped with a rising inflection, regardless of my oft-repeated instructions how to behave in the presence of a period, and I had to go through the daily process of correction, which ended as usual with Clarissa in tears and me wondering why I was born.
The next little girl took up the tale in a droning sing-song that was almost as bad as Clarissa’s halting delivery, and fed the Glouch until he was twice his original size. The climax came when Absalom Butts, by some feat of legerdemain, pulled the bottom out of his desk and his books suddenly fell to the floor with a crash that shattered the nerves of the entire class. Absalom and some of the other boys snickered out loud; the girls looked at me with anxious expectancy.
I sat up very straight. “Class attention!” I commanded, rapping with my ruler. “Close books and put them away,” I ordered next.
Books and papers made a fluttering disappearance, through which the long-drawn sniffs of Clarissa Butts were plainly audible.
“Get your hats and form in line for dismissal,” was the next order that fell on their startled ears.
“She’s going to send us home,” came to my hearing in a sibilant whisper. Clarissa’s sniffs became gurgling sobs as she took her place in the apprehensive line.
“Forward march, and halt outside the door!” I drove them out like sheep before me and then I came out and banged the door shut with a vicious slam. Passing between the two files I divided the ranks into sheep and goats, left and right.
“Class attention!” I called again. “Do you all see that dark spot over there?” said I, pointing to the dim line of trees that marked the beginning of the woods, some seven miles distant.