“Mercy! I hope I won’t!” cried Betty Mosby, with a shiver of well-acted terror.
She was a born sensationalist, and quick to voice sensation.
The teacher’s groan was that of the trained exhorter:
“I can’t answer for that, Betty, if you will dance and go to balls!”
That was her “Firstly.” There were at least six heads and two applications in the lecture “in season” trailing at its heels.
We took it all as a matter of course. Each teacher had ways of his, and her own. Those of our relict were innocent, and our parents did not intermeddle. We were very happy under her tutelage. On Saturdays she had a class in “theorem painting.” That was what she called it, and we thought it a high-sounding title. Decorators know it as one style of frescoing. Pinks, roses, dahlias, tulips, and other flowers with well-defined petals, also birds and butterflies, were cut out of oiled paper. Through the openings left by removing the outlined pattern, paint was rubbed upon card-board laid underneath the oiled paper. I have somewhere still a brick-red pink thus transferred to bristol-board—a fearful production. I knew no better than to accept it thankfully when Mrs. Bass had written on the back, “To my dear pupil, M. V. H., from her affectionate Teacher,” and gave it to me with a kiss on the last day of the term.
She gave up the school and left the county at the close of that term, going to live with a brother in another part of the State. I heard, several years later, that she had “professed sanctification” at a Lynchburg camp-meeting. Nowadays, they would say she “had entered upon the Higher Life.”
She must have found, long ago, the abundant entrance into that Highest Life where creeds and threatenings are abolished. Her benign administration was to me a summer calm that held no presage of the morrow’s storm.