t five minutes to four o'clock the red school-house gave no sign of the redder life beating within its walls. The grounds about it, worn brown by hundreds of restless feet and marked in strange diagrams, the mystic symbols of hop-scotch, marbles, and three-old-cat, were quite deserted save for sparrows busy with crumbs from the mid-day luncheon-pails. Five minutes later, one listening by the picket-fence might have heard faintly the tinkling of little bells, and a rising murmur that with the opening of doors burst suddenly into a tramping of myriad feet, while from the lower hallway two marching lines came down the outer stair, primly in step, till at the foot they sprang into wild disorder, a riot of legs and skirts, with the shouts and shrieks and shrill whistlings of children loosed from bondage. When the noisy tide had swept down the broad walk into the street, Letitia might be seen following smilingly, her skirts surrounded by little girls struggling for the honor of being nearest and bearing her reticule.
At the end of happy days Letitia's face bore the imprint of a sweet contentment, as if the love she had given had been returned twofold, not only in the awkward caresses of her little ones, but in the sight of such tender buds opening day by day through her patient care into fuller knowledge of a great bright world about them. She strove earnestly to show them more of it than the school-books told; she aimed higher than mere correctness in the exercises, those anxious, careful, or heedless scribblings with which her reticule was crammed. In the geography she taught there were deeper colorings than the pale tints of those twenty maps the text-book held; greater currents flowed through those green and pink and yellow lands than the principal rivers there, and in the plains between them greater harvests had been garnered, according to her stories, than the principal products, principal exports—principal paragraphs learned by rote and recited senselessly.
Drawing, in Letitia's room, it was charged against her by one named Shears, who had the interests of the school at heart and jaw, had become a subterfuge for teaching botany as well.
"For draggin' in a study," as he told a group on the corner of Main and Clingstone streets, "not included in the grammar-grade curriculum!"
He paused to let the word have full effect.
"For wastin' the scholars' time and gettin' their feet wet pokin' around in bogs and marshy places, a-pullin' weeds! And for what?—why, by gum, to draw 'em!"
His auditors chuckled.
"What," he asked, "are drawin'-books for?"
His fellow-citizens nodded intelligently.