"That's so," said Hiram, with alacrity. "Andrew, you just make out the appointment, will you? and you post it, Hen, when you go home."
Andrew having gained his point, was generously sorry that he had twitted Hiram about the salary matter, so in the subsequent open meeting he let Hiram do all the talking, looking the while at a dark stain on the ceiling, which a coat of whitewash, put on yearly since he was a boy, had failed to obliterate. He would never forget how that ink went up, and that might be the very same old box stove over in the corner, the one upon which he set that tightly corked bottle of frozen ink to thaw, taking precaution at the same time to be out of the road when it exploded. It had been a particularly brilliant "go off" that—straight up to the ceiling and down in a shower of black spatters. Andrew could see the fun of it yet, and found himself involuntarily looking at his palms, as though some traces of the blisters the teacher's rawhide had raised might still be there. Andrew recalled many other such like exploits, and looked at his smooth, brown palms, thinking how many thorough thrashings he had had, when suddenly a line of poetry he had read some days before, came into his head:
"Lay thy sweet hands in mine, and trust to me."
He sat through the meeting quite oblivious of what was going on, missing what was one of the finest oratorical flights of Hiram Green's career. He was speaking of the departing teacher, and he made many scathing remarks anent the legends and pictures upon the walls, which, as he brilliantly put it, "indicated an entire and deplorable lack of discipline upon the part of the present teacher." The said teacher smiled and said nothing. Had Hiram looked closely at the pictures he would have found that a good many of the drawings were caricatures of himself and his family. In one rude picture the four Misses Green were represented as having hold of a man, who struggled in the midst. By means of certain facial peculiarities, exaggerated as only a genius or a school-boy would dare exaggerate, any one in Ovid could have identified the Misses Green and their victim, a former teacher. One of the ladies held a coat sleeve she had rent off; another a portion of a coat-tail; and over this group the artist had printed in fair round script, "For his garment they cast lots." Under the circumstances the applicability of this would have been a credit to Du Maurier, and be it said in defence of the school-boy artist, it was probably written with no thought of being impious. Your school-boy caricaturist catches the spirit of the times.
The participants in the school meeting were just departing from the school-house doors, when to them came old Sam Symmons. He had just been told by Suse of her application, and an almost stifling eagerness was filling his heart. If she got it, it meant so much: but he presented his usual suave, smiling old face to Hen Braddon and Hiram Green, and said nothing. As Andrew passed the old man looked at him. That look of age to green manhood, how pitiful it is! Andrew paused a moment. "We're going to have an Ovid teacher this time," he said. "You'll tell Suse, won't you, Mr. Symmons, that her appointment is in the mails?"
Poor old Sam! It was harder for him to carry off good fortune with nonchalance than it was to remain impassive in the face of bad. He had had so much more practice in the latter form of self-control. He drew his breath deeply, and his lips quivered a little. Andrew saw this.
"Don't forget to tell her, Mr. Symmons," he added, and went on his way.
Forget!
"Meeting over, Mr. Braddon? Meeting over?" Sam queried, falling into the irregular ranks of the moving men. "Well, well I remember the time your grandfather and I were school trustees, and he was a shoemaker, and a better man with lasts than letters. In his young days he used to go about from house to house making the shoes. He had regular places for calling; two pairs a year was the allowance—well, that custom has long gone by. Anyhow, we were both trustees, and one day we went out to the Beechwood School, section No. 6 now. Well, the minister was there, too, and Squire Harkness—both long dead now—brothers they were. One of the children handed up her slate for your grandfather to look at, and he, holding it in front of him at arm's length, said, with consideration seemingly to its merits, 'Fair, very fair,' which was right enough truly; but when your grandfather held it over to the rest of us, 'twas plain to be seen he had had the slate upside down. Yes, he was ambitious, too, your grandfather was, and got on well in the world; he even bought him a big silver watch. Watches weren't so plentiful in those days. You didn't get a watch in the pocket of every suit of clothes you bought then, as the papers would show you do now. And when we asked your grandfather what time it was, as we would frequently do, being minded to please him, he would take out his watch, look at it with consideration, and hold it out to us saying, 'Who'd ha' thought 'twas that time o' day,' in surprise seemingly, which was right smart, for he never learned to read time, your grandfather didn't. But a good business man he was, and a good neighbour, as many a poor body knew."
Old Sam and his following straggled in twos and threes up the street, past Bill Aikins' house, where Bill stood in the doorway smoking, having just helped his wife Kate, née Horne, hang up the day's washing, school meetings being in his wife's opinion too provocative of idleness, the idleness which the devil improves, to be indulged in by Bill.