"Ye can't drive Milton P.," said that hopeful's mother. "He's been drove so much that he don't take no notice of it. If coaxing won't fetch him, nothin' won't; and I tell 'em if they was all like that they wouldn't be no trouble in the school."
"Well," said Emily Gaskell, the matron of the painted house, a tall, angular woman, with the hectic of the orthodox Yankee consumption on her cheeks, and the orthodox Yankee twinkle in her eye; "ye can manage my boys whatever way ye please, teacher. I ain't pertickeler. They've been coaxed and they've been whipped, but they've always made out to mind by doin' pretty much as they was a mind to. They're smart boys, too," she added, with sincere pride; "but they don't take to larnin'. I never see sich boys. Ye can't git no larnin' into 'em no way. They'd rather be whipped than go to school. Sim had a man to work on our cranberry bog, and he found out that he was first-rate in 'rithmetic, this man was, and so Sim, says he,—I'll give ye the same ye git on the bog,' says he, 'to stay up to the house and larn my boys 'rithmetic,' says he; and the man, he tried it, and in the course of a day or two, he come around to Sim, and wanted to know if he couldn't go back to clarin' bog again."
Emily took in the broadly contemplative expression on Grandma Keeler's benign features, and then winked at me facetiously: "I tell 'em if they was all like that," said she; "and I guess they be, pretty much, they might as well be out o' doors as in, and less worryin' to the teacher."
It might have been the third day of my labors in Wallencamp that a man, having the appearance of a lame giant, entered the school-room, and advanced to meet me with an imposing dignity of mien. He held captive, with one powerful hand, a stubbornly speechless, violently struggling boy. I recognized the man as Godfrey Cradlebow, the handsome fiddler's father, and the boy was none other than the imp whose eyes, scorching and defiant now, had first sent mocking glances back at me while their light-limbed owner kicked out a jaunty rigadoon from under the encircling folds of his sacerdotal vestments.
"Miss Hungerford, I beg your pardon," said the elder Cradlebow, with a distinct, refined enunciation foreign to the native element of Wallencamp, whose ordinary locution had something of a Hoosier accent "After a good deal of trouble in catching him, I have finally succeeded in bringing you in this—a—this little dev"—he made an impressive pause, patted his fiery offspring on the head with fatherly dignity, and eyed him, at once doubtfully and reflectively.
I was interested in observing the aspect of the two faces.
"The little boy resembles you, I think," I said.
The lame man struck his cane down hard upon the floor and laughed immoderately.
"If you knew what I had in my mind to say!" he exclaimed—"ah! that was well put, well put!—though but dubiously complimentary, but dubiously so, I assure you, either to father or son!"
The idea still continuing to tickle him, he laughed more gently, beating a sympathetic tattoo with his cane on the floor.