"I don't agree with you," said Letitia, lost in her theme, and noting only the fact, and not the nature, of the opposition. "I don't agree with you at all. It would teach them the beauty of manly—Why do you laugh?"
If Shears could have heard her! His information, such as it was, had been derived from his only son, a youth named David, "not by Angelo," Letitia said, and hopelessly indolent, whose only fondness was for sticking pins into smaller boys. He was useful, however, as a barometer in which the rise or fall of his surly impudence registered the parental feeling against her rule.
Shears and his kind held that the proper study of mankind was arithmetic. What would he not have said at the corner of Main and Clingstone streets, had he known that Letitia was trifling with Robinson's Complete?—that between its lines, she was teaching (surreptitiously would have been his word), an original, elementary course in ethics, a moral law of honesty, fair-dealing, and full-measure, so that all examples, however intricate, were worked out rigidly to the seventh decimal, by the Golden Rule!
Red geraniums bloomed in her school-room window, and on a corner-shelf, set so low that the children easily might have leaned upon it, lay Webster and another book—always one other; though sometimes large and sometimes small, now green, now red, now blue, now yellow, but always seeming to have been left there carelessly. Every volume bore on its fly-leaf two names—"David Buckleton Primrose," written in a bold, old-fashioned script in fading ink, and below it "Letitia Primrose," in a smaller, finer but no less quaint a hand. That book, whatever its name and matter, had been left there purposely, you may be sure. Letitia remembered how young Keats drank his first sweet draught of Homer and became a Greek; how little lame Walter poured over border legends to become the last of the Scottish minstrels; and how that other, that English boy, swam the Hellespont in a London street, to climb on its farther side, that flowery bank called poesy. It was her dream that among her foster-children, as she fondly called them, there might be one, perhaps, some day—some rare soul waiting rose-like for the sun, who would find it shining on her school-room shelf. So she dropped there weekly in the children's way, as if by accident, and without a word to them unless they asked, books which had been her father's pride or her own young world of dreams—books of all times and mental seasons, but each one chosen with her end in mind. They were beyond young years, she admitted frankly, as school years go, but when her Keats came, she would say, smiling, they would be bread-and-wine to him; milk and wild-honey they had been to her.
"Suppose," said Dove, "it should be a girl who bears away sacred fire from your shelf, Letitia?"
"Yes, it might be a girl," replied the school-mistress. "Perhaps—who knows?—another 'Shakespeare's daughter'!" And yet, she added, and with the faintest color in her cheeks, knowing well that we knew her preference, she rather hoped it would be a boy.
Few could resist that book waiting by the dictionary; at least they would open it, spell out its title-page, flutter its yellowing leaves, looking for pictures, and, disappointed, close it and turn away. But sometimes one more curious would stop to read a little, and now and then, to Letitia's joy, a lad more serious than the rest would turn inquiringly to ask the meaning of what he found there; then she would tell its story and loan the volume, hoping that Johnny Keats had come at last.
No one will ever know how many subtle lures she set to tempt her pupils into pleasant paths, but men and women in Grassy Ford today remember that it was Miss Primrose who first said this, or told them that, and while her discipline is sometimes smiled at—she was far too trusting at times, they tell me—doubtless, no one is the worse for it, since whatever evil she may have failed to nip, may be balanced now by the good of some lovely memory. Bad boys grown tall remembering their hookey-days do not forget the woman they cajoled with their forged excuses; and it is a fair question, I maintain, boldly, as one of that guilty clan, whether the one who put them on an honor they did not have, or, let us say, had mislaid temporarily—whether the recollection of Letitia Primrose and her innocence is not more potent now for good than the crimes she overlooked, for evil.
Sometimes I wonder if she was half so blind as she appeared to be, for as we walked one Sabbath by the water-side, with the sun golden on the marshes, and birds and flowers and caressing breezes beguiling our steps farther and farther from the drowsy town, I remember her saying:
"It is for this my boys play truant in the spring-time. Do you wonder, Bertram?"