The next day there was a rumpus at the school. What happened there was even more incredible than the doings of Reardon. The local Superintendent was proud of his neatly operated educational system, and had set that date for showing around a group of distinguished visitors.
Neither the newspapers nor Carrie ever managed to get straight at exactly what point things had begun to go wrong. When they tried to trace the events of that day practically all the distinguished visitors, including two college presidents, the president of the Board of Education, a Professor of Educational Psychology and two heads of Normal Schools gave different and conflicting stories.
What did come out, however, was that all six visitors had distinguished themselves in a quite unexpected way. They had run around the school madly waving torches and yelling, "Down with school! Down with school! Burn the place down!"
The firemen had arrived in time to prevent much damage but the incendiaries had been rounded up only with great difficulty after school had been dismissed. The President of the Board of Education had beaten up the Superintendent and the two college presidents had ganged up on one of the hastily summoned policemen. Later on they could give no reason for why they had done so.
"It's a crazy world," thought Carrie wisely. "You never know what sort of lunatic you'll run into next." And then she put it out of her mind and turned to a more important problem. What could she have for dinner that night that would please Bill and not make him say, "You know I never eat spinach,"—or broccoli or her new sauce or whatever it was he was never eating that week?
All the same it didn't surprise her greatly when Bill came home the day after and said, "You'll never guess what happened at the office."
"Somebody else went crazy."
"Nobody went crazy. We all slept."
"What?"
"We all slept. At ten o'clock Mr. Elvergard came in and said, 'All right, boys and girls, we've been working too hard, all of us. Let's take a nice long rest today, shall we? Put your pretty little heads on your pretty little desks. One, two, three, snooze!'"