Afterwards I found it to be one of her greatest peculiarities, this desire to know what her neighbors had to eat, and I seldom passed her door that she did not inquire of me concerning the “kind of fare” I had at the different places where I boarded. When I reached the schoolhouse, I found George Randall transferring his books to another part of the room, at the same time telling Isaac “he could have the disputed seat if he wanted it.”
With the right kind of training and influence Isaac Ross would have been a fine boy, for there were in his disposition many noble traits of character, and when he saw how readily George gave up the seat, he refused to take it, saying, “he didn’t care a darn where he sat—one place was as good as another.”
That day was long and dreary enough. Not more than half the children were there, and I found it exceedingly tiresome and monotonous, sitting in that hard, splint-bottomed chair, and telling Emma Fitch and Sophia Brown, for the hundredth time, that the round letter was “O” and the crooked one “S.” The scholars, too, began to grow noisy, and to ask me scores of useless questions. Their lessons were half learned, and if I made a suggestion, I was quickly informed that their former teacher, Sally Damm, didn’t do so. Even little Emma Fitch, when I bade her keep her eyes on the book instead of letting them wander about the room, lisped out that “Thally Damm let her look off;” a fact I did not dispute when I found that she had been to school all winter without learning a single letter by sight, though she could repeat the entire alphabet forward and back and be all the while watching a squirrel on the branches of the tree which grew near the window.
Before night a peculiar kind of sickness, never dangerous, but decidedly disagreeable, began to creep over me, and had it not been for the mud, I should probably have footed it to Meadow Brook, where alone could be found the cure for my disease. Just before school was out a little boy cried to go home, and this was the one straw too many. Hastily dismissing the scholars, I turned towards the window and my tears fell as fast as did the rain in the early morning.
“The schoolma’am’s cryin,’—she is. I saw her,” circulated rapidly among the children, who all rushed back to ascertain the truth for themselves.
“I should think she would cry,” said one of the girls to her brother. “You’ve acted ugly enough to make anybody cry, and if you don’t behave better to-morrow, Jim Maxwell, I’ll tell mother!”
After the delivery of this speech, the entire group moved away, leaving me alone; and sure am I there was never a more homesick child than was the one, who, with her head lying upon the desk, sat there weeping in that low, dirty schoolroom, on that dark, rainy afternoon. Where now was all the happiness I had promised myself in teaching? Alas! it was rapidly disappearing, and I was just making up my mind to brave the ridicule of Meadow Brook, and give up my school at once, when a hand was laid very gently on my shoulder, and a voice partially familiar said, “What’s the matter, Rose?”
So absorbed was I in my grief, that I had not heard the sound of footsteps, and with a start of surprise I looked up and met the serene, handsome eyes of Dr. Clayton, who stood at my side! He had been to visit a patient, he said, and was on his way home, when, seeing the door ajar, he had come in, hoping to find me there, “but I did not expect this,” he continued, pointing to the tears on my cheek. “What is the matter? Don’t the scholars behave well, or are you homesick?”
At this question I began to cry so violently, that the doctor, after exhausting all his powers of persuasion, finally laid his hand soothingly on my rough, tangled curls, ere I could be induced to stop. Then, when I told him how disappointed I was, how I wished I had never tried to teach, and how I meant to give it up, he talked to me so kindly, so brotherlike, still keeping his hand on my shoulder, where it had fallen when I lifted up my head, that I grew very calm, thinking I could stay in that gloomy room forever, if he were only there! He was, as I have said before, very handsome, and his manner was so very fascinating, and his treatment of me so much like what I fancied Charlie’s would be, were he a grown up man and I a little girl, that I began to like him very, very much, thinking then that my feeling for him was such as a child would entertain for a father, for I had heard that he was twenty-seven, and between that and thirteen there was, in my estimation, an impassable gulf.
“I wish I had my buggy here,” he said at last, after consulting his watch, which pointed to half-past five, “I wish I had my buggy here, for then I could carry you home. You’ll wet your feet, and you ought not to walk. Suppose you ride in my lap; but no,” he added, quickly, “you’d better not, for Mrs. Thompson and Mother Ross would make it a neighborhood talk.”