“Hush-h-h,” murmured Miss Amelia, Miss Jean being speechless. “You will sit here,” and she nervously indicated a place in the front bench. “By-and-by, dear, we will see what you can do.”
Bud took her place composedly, and rose with the rest to join in the Lord’s Prayer. The others mumbled it; for her it was a treat to have to say it there for the first time in her life in public. Into the words she put interest and appeal; for the first time the doo-cot heard that supplication endowed with its appropriate dignity. And then the work of the day began. The school lay in the way of the main traffic of the little town: they could hear each passing wheel and footstep, the sweet “chink, chink” from the smithy, whence came the smell of a sheep’s head singeing. Sea-gulls and rooks bickered and swore in the gutters of the street; from fields behind came in a ploughman’s whistle as he drove his team, slicing green seas of fallow as a vessel cuts the green, green wave. Four-and-twenty children, four-and-twenty souls, fathers and mothers of the future race, all outwardly much alike with eyes, noses, hands, and ears in the same position, how could the poor Misses Duff know what was what in the stuff they handled? Luckily for their peace of mind, it never occurred to them that between child and child there was much odds. Some had blue pinafores and some white; some were freckled and some had warts and were wild, and these were the banker’s boys. God only knew the other variations. ’Twas the duty of the twins to bring them all in mind alike to the one plain level.
It was lucky that the lessons of that day began with the Shorter Catechism, for it kept the ignorance of Lennox Dyce a little while in hiding. She heard with amazement of Effectual Calling and Justification and the reasons annexed to the fifth commandment as stammeringly and lifelessly chanted by the others; but when her turn came, and Miss Jean, to test her, asked her simply Man’s Chief End, she answered boldly—
“Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him for ever.”
“Very good! very good indeed!” said the twin encouragingly. She was passing on to the next pupil, when Bud burst out with her own particular reason annexed, borrowed from the rapturous explanation of her uncle.
“Man is a harp,” she said as solemnly as he had said it—“a har-r-rp with a thousand strings; and we must sing, sing, sing, even if we’re timmer as a cask, and be grateful always, and glad in the mornings with things.”
If the whistling ploughman and his team had burst into the schoolroom it would have been no greater marvel, brought no more alarm to the breasts of the little teachers. They looked at her as if she had been a witch. The other pupils stared, with open mouths.
“What’s that you say, my dear?” said Miss Amelia. “Did you learn that in America?”
“No,” said Bud, “I just found it out from Uncle Dan.”
“Silence!” cried Miss Jean, for now the class was tittering again. She went with her sister behind the black-board, and nervously they communed. Bud smiled benignly on her fellows.