“Can we see the school from here?” asked Elizabeth Ann, who was just the least bit anxious over the idea of going to a new school.
CHAPTER VII
SCHOOL NEWS
“See the school?” echoed Aunt Grace. “My dear child, of course you can’t see the school; why it’s fully three miles from here, on the other side of that section of woods. You have to walk half a mile to get the bus.”
Elizabeth Ann hadn’t heard about the bus, and neither had Doris.
“You’re going to a consolidated school,” explained Aunt Grace. “When I was a little girl they didn’t have them—we went to a little school house near this farm. There was only one room, and my older sister taught all the grades. But now they have combined a number of these small schools into one large one. A bus goes through the country gathering up the scholars, and in that way one school building can be made to do the work of six or seven one-room buildings.”
“Why doesn’t the bus come and get us right here?” Doris asked.
That was almost the first question she had asked and Aunt Grace told her she was glad to hear her voice.
“The bus couldn’t go round to every farm—it would take too long,” Aunt Grace said. “So the pupils gather in certain places where the bus driver knows they’ll be, and he picks them up in groups. You and Elizabeth Ann and the other children who live around here, have to walk to the nearest cross-roads—your uncle will tell you what time the bus passes there and what time you have to leave the house. If there’s a bad storm or it rains too hard, he will take you in the car as far as the cross-roads; but your Uncle Doctor wrote to tell me that he wanted both of you to walk whenever it is possible.”
Elizabeth Ann liked to walk and Doris didn’t. But everyone did as Uncle Doctor directed, always.