“What's matter, Mr. Young?”
“Why, dang it all! I'll report to the Reeve. Fust thing yeh know there'll be a string-a-teams from here to the next concession blockin' that there road in front of the school!”
“Why, what's the matter with the school, Mr. Young?” inquired old Hector, in anxious surprise.
“Why, ain't ye heard her? Say! down in Maine I paid a dollar one 'time to hear a big singer, forgit her name, but she was 'lowed to be the dangdest singer in all them parts. But, Gol dang my cats to cinders! she ain't any more like that there teacher of yours than my old Tom cat's like the angel that leads the choir in Abram's bosom!”
“That is very interesting, Mr. Young. And I suppose you won't mind paying a little extra school rate now,” said Hector, with a shrewd twinkle in his eye.
“Extra school rate! I tell yeh what, I'll charge up my lost time to the trustees! But danged if I wouldn't give a day's pay to hear that song again!”
In application of this principle of reward for merit, the teacher introduced a subordinate principle which proved effective when all else failed. The school was made corporately and jointly responsible for the individual. The offence of one was the offence of all, the merit of one the merit of all. Thus every pupil was associated with her in the business of securing good lessons and exemplary conduct. As the day went on each misdemeanour was gravely, and in full view of the school, marked down upon the blackboard. The merits obtained by any pupil were in like manner recorded. The day closing with an adverse balance knew no hour of song. Woe to the boy who, dead to all other motives of good conduct, persisted in robbing the school of its hour of delight. In the case of Ab Maddock, big, impudent, and pachydermous, it took Dugald Robertson, the minister's son, just half an hour's hard fighting to extract a promise of good behaviour. Dugald was in the main a thoughtful, peaceable boy, the most advanced pupil in the entrance class, and a great mathematician. At first he was inclined to despise the teacher, setting little store by her beautiful face and fascinating smile, for on the very first day he discovered her woful mathematical inadequacy. Arithmetic was her despair. With algebraic formulae and Euclid's propositions her fine memory saved her. But with quick intuition she threw herself frankly upon the boy's generosity, and in the evenings together they, with Margaret's assistance, wrestled with the bewildering intricacies of arithmetical problems. Her open confession of helplessness, and her heroic attempts to overcome her defects, made irresistible appeal to the chivalrous heart of the little Highland gentleman. Thenceforth he was her champion for all that was in him.
But the teacher's weakness in mathematics was atoned for, if atonement there be for such a weakness, by the ample strength of her endowments in those branches of learning in which imagination and artistic sensibility play any large part. And a far larger part, and far more important, do these Divine gifts play than many wise educationists conceive. The lessons in history, in geography, and in reading ceased to be mere memory tasks and became instinct with life. The whole school would stay its ordinary work to listen while the teacher told tales of the brave days of old to the history class, or transformed the geography lessons into excursions among people of strange tongues dwelling in far lands. But it was in the reading lessons that her artistic talents had full play. The mere pronouncing and spelling of words were but incidents in the way of expression of thought and emotion. After a whole week of drilling which she would give to a single lesson, she would arrest the class with the question, “What is the author seeing?” and with the further question, “How does he try to show it to us?” Reading, to her, consisted in the ability to see what the author saw and the art of telling it, and to set forth with grace that thing in the author's words.
In the writing class her chief anxiety was to avoid blots. Every blot might become an occasion of humiliation to teacher and pupils alike. “Oh, this will never do! They must not see this!” she would cry, rubbing out with infinite care and pains the blot, and rubbing in the horror of such a defilement being paraded before the eyes of the vague but terrible “they.”
Thus the pathway trodden in the school routine was, perchance, neither wide nor far extended, but it was thoroughly well trodden. As a consequence, when the day for the closing exercises came around both teacher and pupils had become so thoroughly familiar with the path and so accustomed to the vision of the onlooking public that they faced the ordeal without dread, prepared to give forth whatever of knowledge or accomplishment they might possess.