I am told that the crowd agreed with him so heartily and with such congratulatory delight that he was emboldened to announce himself then and there as a candidate for the school-board. Though he failed of election, there was always a party in Grassy Ford opposed to new-fangled methods in the schools. Letitia herself was quite aware that even among her fellow-teachers there were those who smiled at her geraniums, and there had been some criticism of her manner of conducting classes. Shears was fond of relating how a visitor to her room had found a class in fractions discussing robins' eggs! Letitia explained the matter simply enough, but the fact remained for the Colonel to enlarge upon.
"A lesson," he said, "in Robinson's Complete Arithmetic, page twenty-seven, may end in somebody's apple-tree, or the top of Sun Dial, or Popocatapetl, or Peru! Gentlemen, I maintain that such dilly-dallying is a subversion of the—"
"Subversion!" growled old man Butters, who still came out on sunny days with the aid of his cane. "I calculate you mean it's not right."
"That," said the orator, suavely, "is the meaning I intended to convey, Mr. Butters."
"Well, then, you're wrong," grumbled the old man. "Why, that there girl"—he called her so till the day he died, this side of ninety—"that there girl's a trump, Sam Shears, I tell ye. She teaches Robinson and God A'mighty, too!"
Letitia was often now in the public eye; her teaching was made a campaign issue, though all her nature shrank from such contests. It was easy to attack her manner of instruction, and sometimes difficult to defend it—it had been so subtle in its plan, and so unusual in its execution, and, moreover, time alone could disclose what fruits would ripen from its flowery care. Old Mr. Butters had put roughly what Dr. Primrose himself had taught:
"Dearly beloved, in the fountains of learning, no less than in the water-brooks, His lilies blow."
"Wouldst thou love God?" he asked, in the last sermon that he ever wrote. "First, love His handiwork."
It was his daughter's motto. It hung on the walls of her simple chamber, with others from her "other poets," as she used to call them—little rubrics printed for her in red and gold at the "Pide Bull." That handiwork of God which she still called Grassy Fordshire was so full of marvels to this poet's daughter, there were so many flowers in it, the birds there sang so blithely, its waters ran with such tremulous messages echoed by woods and whispered by meadow-grasses, its skies, melting into glowing promises in the west, shone thereafter with such jewelled truths, she could hold no text-books higher than her Lord's.
It was not mere duty that drew her morn after morn, year after year, to the red-brick school-house. All the tenderness, all those eager hopes and fears which she lavished so upon her labor, meant life and love to her, for she truly loved them—those troops of laughing, heedless children, passing like flocks of birds, stopping with her for a little twittering season to seize her bounty and, as it seemed to her, fly on gayly and forget.