All on a Saturday night.
All your right hands in,
All your right hands out,
Shake your right hands a little, a little,
And turn yourselves about.
Twenty shrill childish trebles (no, nineteen, for Lizzie Wraggles still sat on the hassock in the corner) sang out the old tune and words; nineteen right legs were shaken, nineteen left legs too; then hands and heads wriggled and shook all through the six verses.
Every morning after the game came composition. Sometimes it was History composition, sometimes Geography, sometimes Scripture; sometimes just anything Miss Lavinia read out of a book. The best composition time of all was when Miss Lavinia told a story, right out of her head.
The children only half understood Miss Lavinia’s stories, but in spite of this they liked them better than any others, possibly because they felt that these stories belonged to them and to Miss Lavinia only; out of all the world no one else could know them, they were every bit their own.
It was to be Scripture composition this morning. When it was composition all the children listened to Miss Lavinia first of all, then the older boys and girls wrote about it from memory, while the little ones did something else.
After the games “Coppersition” was what Tommy liked best of all. Tommy had a very real love for Miss Lavinia. To most people she was just a little old maid who had great difficulty in making both ends meet, but Tommy admired her greatly. He liked to look at her all the time she was speaking; he admired the wave of her silvery hair and the shape of her delicate, white hands—so different from Mammy’s hands. Still his Mammy had the most beautiful hands in all the world, and he would fight any boy his own size who said she hadn’t. Thus he ruminated when the composition class began. Then he wondered if Miss Lavinia would agree to wait for him until he was grown up, so that he could marry her then if Ruthie would not greatly mind.