I looked within, and there, mounted upon two desks and a chair, stood the Dominie with his head through a round hole in the boards of the roof, and all that one could see of him convulsed with animation.
The bairns below were in a great consternation, crying out that this one and that other was misbehaving—that Robin Gibb was pinching, or that Towhead Kennedy was in the act of some piece of villainy which remained unexpressed, for the obvious reason that the heavy hand of Towhead Kennedy had prisoned the information within the mouth of the tale-bearer.
The school of Maybole was an apartment nearly square, with a dark, well-hacked oaken writing-desk running round two sides of it, and benches set cross-ways on the floor, where, when the peace was undisturbed by internal war, the bairns conned their tasks from worn copies of the Bible.
At the far end of the school was a wooden bar a foot from the floor, and a little behind it another. This was called the hangman, for it was the post of judgment to unruly boys, who were called upon to kneel over the first bar and grasp the second, thus putting themselves into a proper position for the operations of the fiery and untender little Dominie. The desk of the master had a framework behind it, in which were half-a-dozen birch rods, carefully kept and oiled, even as I keep my stands of arms,—for the callants of Maybole have ever been unruly, and so remain to this day.
Dominie Mure was in stature the least, but in learning, I can well believe, the greatest of dominies, for he was never without two or three scholars in the Latin. It was whispered by the malicious that he had been trained for a clerk in the old days of the Roman Church, but made a false step, and so had to turn dominie. Taking the words at their usual meaning, I utterly condemn and reject this lying, malicious explanation, for Dominie Mure was the least handsome man in Carrick. He was little, scarce bigger than many boys of twelve and fourteen who sat in his class in the New Testament—which was naturally the class beneath the Old Testament.
His hair grew all over his head and face, grey, wiry and rough, like burned heather. Out of this tangle a pair of humorsome eyes looked, and a stout nose projected like the angle of an overgrown and ruined building. His arms were long, and so strong that he could lift any lad in the school into the air with one of them, while he gave him 'paikie' with the other. So fierce and fiery was the little man, that no one of the great stalwart loons who came in the winter-time dared to try their pranks upon him. He would fly at them swift as the wild cat springs, and beat half-a-dozen black and blue before they had time to rally.
What he was now doing with his head through the ceiling I could not well imagine. But there was a great noise aloft and a rushing of feet, while the master made desperate dives hither and thither, like a man in deep water and not well able to swim.
Beneath, one little rascal of a bare-legged loon rose from the seat where he had been sitting squirming at his copy.
'The Dominie is lost!' he cried in great pretended alarm. 'Oh, sirs, where is our Dominie? Look in the ink-horns, lassies. Look in a' your pouches, laddies!'
And so all the ill-set vagabonds rose and began to search the ink-horns, the dinner wallets, and even in the rat holes for the master.