"Of course I will, sir. I made that promise once before."
"Indeed? To whom? Miss Jerusha?"
"Miss Jerusha!" said Georgia, laughing. "I guess not! To a friend of mine—a young gentleman."
And the girl of fifteen glanced up from under her long lashes at the dignified man of forty.
"Pooh, Georgia! stick to your books, and never mind the genus homo. You're a pretty subject to be advised by young gentlemen. It was good advice, though, and I indorse it."
"Very well, sir; but why am I to attend to my studies more than any of the rest of your pupils—Mary Ann Jones, for instance?"
"Humph! there is a wide difference. Mary Ann Jones will go home and help her mother to knit stockings, scrub the floor, make pumpkin pies, and eat them, too, without even a thought of mischief, while you would be breaking your neck or somebody else's, setting the iron on fire, or bottling thunderbolts to blow up the community generally. As there is more truth than poetry in that couplet of the solemn and prosy Dr. Watts, wherein he assures us—
"'Satan finds some mischief still
For idle hands to do,'
on that principle you need to be kept busy. Between you and Mary Ann Jones there is about as much difference as there is between that useful domestic fowl, a barnyard goose, and that dangerous, sharp-clawed, good-for-nothing thing, a tameless mountain eaglet; and you may consider the comparison anything but complimentary to you. Mary Ann is going to be a merry, contented, capital housekeeper, and you—what are you going to be?"
"A vagabones on the face of the airth," said Georgia, imitating Miss Jerusha's nasal twang so well that it nearly overset the good teacher's gravity.