It was quite a game after all, and they all entered gaily into the spirit of it, everybody helping to push the furniture about and arrange boxes and tables and chairs for the "school."
Mrs. Peniman took Sara, Paul, Mary, and David into the rear part of the sod house and drew the curtains between, and Mr. Peniman got out the school-books they had brought with them from Ohio and set Joe, Lige, Sam, Nina, and Ruth at work.
The program was so arranged that while some of the more advanced pupils, as Joe and Lige, were studying, the less advanced, as Sam and Ruth, were reciting. As Sam and Ruth had always kept pretty well together in their classes they were a great help to one another, but Nina was a problem. While far in advance of Sam and Ruth in English, geography, reading, and spelling, she was hopelessly behind them in grammar and mathematics. Indeed her whole curriculum of studies had been so superficially and sketchily acquired that Mr. Peniman scarcely knew what to do with her.
"I think I'll have to put you up a grade, Nina," he told her jokingly. "You are far and away beyond Ruth and Sam, yet I hardly think that on account of your arithmetic you could keep up with Lige and Joe."
"Oh, please do put me up with Lige and Joe, Father Peniman," begged Nina; "I have never really studied in my life, but I believe that I could keep up if I studied with Joe."
At first she made sad work of her lessons. Her work was brilliant but superficial, and Mr. Peniman, who insisted on thoroughness, was completely discouraged with her. On one occasion when she had signally failed in a recitation and had retired to her seat in tears Joe came to her side to comfort her.
"You don't know how to study, that's what's the matter with you, Princess," he told her. "Let me help you. We'll get our lessons together this evening."
Nina smiled up at him through her tears. "Oh, thank you, thank you, Joesy," she whispered. "I know I don't know how to study. I never really went to school, I always had governesses and tutors and never had to. But I can learn—I know I can—if you will teach me." And after that Joe and Nina always studied together, Joe's thorough, methodical mind acting as a balance as well as an incentive to the more brilliant but less logical mind of Nina.
Mrs. Peniman meanwhile with her little flock gathered about her knees had various and sundry milestones on the road of knowledge to start from. While Paul read and spelled well, wrote a fine large hand and had been initiated into the mysteries of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, Sara was only staggering through simple addition, stumbled sadly in reading, and was still scrawling huge hieroglyphics that only by the greatest courtesy could be called writing, Mary knew her letters and was in the c-a-t, cat, and r-a-t, rat, stage of development, and little David was still at sea in an ocean of letters, from which he could pick out a round O or a crooked S on occasion.
It was not easy teaching, but the parents had given up their home and friends and all the comforts of life to obtain for these young people greater and better opportunities, and were not to be balked by small difficulties. Day after day while the snow fell and the wind howled across the prairies the little school went on, and soon began to grow accustomed to the conditions, and the pupils to make rapid strides.