"Yes, we must hasten," assented Dudley, consulting his big silver watch, after thrusting his wet handkerchief into the bosom of his coat.
David Purviance, a young licentiate awaiting ordination at the next session of presbytery, preached the afternoon sermon, and handled his theme, "The Final Perseverance of the Saints," in a masterly manner. But Abner Dudley gave little heed to the discourse; for his thoughts, stirred by the vision of the beautiful girl across the aisle, were wandering in an earthly paradise.
Through the deepening twilight he rode home alone that evening in a tumult of bewildered feeling, scarcely able to realize that only that morning he had been on that same road with Henry and Susan; for in the interim he seemed to have entered an entirely new world of thought and feeling.
CHAPTER IV.
WINTER SCHOOL-DAYS
Soon beautiful, misty Indian summer had vanished before the stern approach of winter. The chestnut burs had all opened; the wild grapevines, clinging to fence rails along the roadside and twining in drooping profusion over the trees in wood and thicket, had long ago been robbed of their glistening, dark clusters of frost-ripened fruit. The squirrels had laid in their supply of nuts; the birds had given their last Kentucky concert of the season and had departed to fill their winter engagements in the Southland; and the forest trees waved their bare arms and bowed their heads to the wind that wailed a mournful requiem for departed summer.
By this time the wheat had been sown, and the last shock of corn gathered. The school forces were, therefore, augmented by the advent of a dozen or more larger boys and young men, eager to gain all the learning that could be compassed in the months which intervened before early spring plowing and seeding would call them again to the fields.
In the icy gray dawn of these winter days the boy whose week it was to build the schoolhouse fire, would resist the temptation to snug down again in the soft folds of the big feather bed for another trip into delicious dreamland, and would hurry from his warm nest to attend to his morning chores, so that as soon as the early breakfast was over he could hasten through the snow-covered fields to the schoolhouse. There he would pile the fagots high in the big fireplace, eager to have them blazing and crackling before the clap of the master's ferule upon his desk at eight o'clock should summon the school to its daily work.
Cane Ridge school, under the gentle yet energetic sway of Abner Dudley, presented a busy scene. The click of the soapstone pencil upon the frameless slate, the scratch of the quill pen across the bespattered copybook, the shrill tone of the solitary reader as he stood with the rest of the class "toeing the mark" before the master, or the shriller tones of the arithmetic class reciting in concert the multiplication table, kept up a pleasant discord throughout the short day. The rear guard of this army of busy workers, the rows of chubby-faced little boys in short-legged pants and long-sleeved aprons, and of rosy-cheeked little girls in linsey dresses and nankeen pantalets, sat on their slab benches, droning mechanically "a-b, ab; e-b, eb," and looked with wonder at the middle rank of this army, adding up long columns of figures or singing the long list of capitals. Those of the middle rank, in their turn, as they gave place before the master's desk to the three bright pupils of the vanguard, wondered no less to see them performing strange maneuvers called "parsing and conjugating," or battling successfully against Tare and Tret, or that still more insidious foe, Vulgar Fractions. Ahead of this vanguard, on a far-off, dizzy peak of erudition, was Betsy Gilcrest, the courageous color-bearer of the army—actually speaking in an unknown tongue called Latin, and executing surprising feats of legerdemain with that strange trio, x, y and z, who had somehow escaped from their lowly position at the tail end of the alphabet, to play unheard-of antics and to assume characters utterly bewildering.