“If you interrupt so much, I never shall finish my story, Anstice,” she said.
“I want the girls to understand this,” said Miss Anstice with decision. “The principal said she was the best educated scholar he had ever seen graduated from Hilltop Academy.”
“Well, now if you have finished,” said Miss Salisbury, laughing, “I will proceed. So I was despatched by my father to a town about thirty miles away, to a boarding school kept by the widow of a clergyman who had been a college classmate. Well, I was sorry to leave all my young brothers and sisters, you may be sure, while my mother—girls, I haven't even now forgotten the pang it cost me to kiss my mother good-bye.”
Miss Salisbury stopped suddenly, and let her gaze wander off to the waving tree-tops; and Miss Anstice fell into a revery that kept her face turned away.
“But it was the only way I could get an education; and you know I could not be fitted for a teacher, which was to be my life work, unless I went; so I stifled all those dreadful feelings which anticipated my homesickness, and pretty soon I found myself in the boarding school.”
“How many scholars were there, Miss Salisbury?” asked Laura Page, who was very exact.
“Fifteen girls,” said Miss Salisbury.
“Oh dear me, what a little bit of a school!” exclaimed one girl.
“The schools were not as large in those days,” said Miss Salisbury. “You must keep in mind the great difference between that time and this, my dear. Well, and when I was once there, I had quite enough to do to keep me from being homesick, I can assure you, through the day; because, in addition to lessons, there was the sewing hour.”
“Sewing? Oh my goodness me!” exclaimed Alexia. “You didn't have to sew at that school, did you, Miss Salisbury?”