"Go it, Pierce-eye! Hit him one in the eye!"
This exclamation was traced afterwards to Cleg Kelly's acquaintance in day-school with a baleful ballad included in the Royal Poetry Book, and intituled "Chevy Chase."
Mr. Somerville thereupon promptly lost his rightful and given name, and became to all eternity—or so long, at least, as he remained at Hunker Court—"Old One-in-the Eye."
But it so happened that, on this particular Sunday, Cleg's teacher with the pugnacious title was absent; and, in despite of the notice prominently placarded on the walls behind the superintendent's desk, he was absent without having provided a substitute.
There was nothing for it, therefore, but that Samson Langpenny should take the class himself. And he would as soon have faced a battery of artillery as a class in which sat the Egyptian plague of his school, Cleg Kelly. It was, indeed, on this particular day that there came to Samson the resolution to try him with Miss Celie Tennant as a last resource, previous to a second and final expulsion.
Indeed, he would have chosen the latter alternative long ago, but for a well-grounded inward belief that, at the close of the hour after Cleg's compulsory exit, there would not be a whole pane of glass in all the many windows of Hunker Court Sunday school. He remembered well as a teacher the awful scene which accompanied the first expulsion under the reign of "Pund o' Cannles"—a scene which since his return had made Cleg almost idolised by the scholars of Hunker Court.
Samson Langpenny sat down to teach the Border Ruffians of the Sooth Back—Cleg Kelly's class. Now he was out of place, and knew it. His true sphere in a Sunday school was in the infant department; where, with a packet of butterscotch and "Hush-a-bye, Baby!" he might have been a great and shining success.
Why the minister did not see this was a standing problem in Hunker Court. But, as the teachers said one to another on their several ways home:
"It is so hard to get the minister to see anything—and as for his wife——"
"Can you say your Psalm—metrical version?" asked Samson Langpenny, as though of a certainty they were all letter-perfect in the prose version.