Colonel Silsbee entered the room, read the Scripture lesson as usual, and offered the morning prayer. Then, seating himself again in his chair, he looked down for a moment on the bright and expectant faces before him. In that look, kindly but stern, his pupils discovered the first cloud upon the horizon of their hopes.
[CHAPTER IV.]
THE ORDER OF THE BLACK STAR.
Colonel Silsbee’s manner was deliberate, and his voice was very firm as he began to speak.
“I promised your committee,” he said, “to give you my decision at this time in the matter of your proposed holiday. I will say at the outset, that your request, if it may be considered a request, cannot be granted. Perhaps I should leave the matter there, and refrain from giving you the reasons for my decision; but this is an unusual case, and I will take the unusual course of explaining my action.
“There are several good reasons for my decision to deny what you ask. In the first place, it would have been impossible to make the proper arrangements between the time your petition was handed to me and the time at which it would have been necessary to start. Moreover, I am informed that the woods are still too damp to make it quite safe for you to spend a whole day there. Some of you are quite delicate in health, and I should not be willing to allow you thus to expose yourselves.
“These reasons would be sufficient on which to base a refusal of your demand if there were no others; but there are others, and they are such as to make a refusal necessary simply as a matter of school discipline.
“I cannot—no teacher could—receive with favor a paper couched in such language as is the one which you have presented to me this morning. A holiday in this school is not a matter of right, but of grace. That must be plainly understood. Petitions must be so worded as to imply authority in the principal; if they are not, they certainly will not be granted; they will not even be considered. More than that, the presentation hereafter of such a petition as the one of this morning will be regarded not only as a breach of courtesy, but of discipline, and will be acted upon accordingly.