"Wish you would," said Jimmy. "Hello, there's Chicken Little crying again. He's more of a baby than our Eddo."
Henry was crying now because Dave Blake had called him a coward. So very, very unjust! He stood near the schoolhouse door, wiping his eyes on his checked apron and saying:—
"I'll go tell the teacher, Dave Blake!"
"Well, go along and tell her then. Fie, for shame!"
Henry, a feeble, petted child, was always falling into trouble and always threatening to tell the teacher. Kyzie considered him very tiresome; but to-day when he came to her with his tale of woe, she listened patiently, because she had done him a wrong and wished to atone for it. She had "really and truly" suspected this simple child of a crime! He would not take so much as a pin without leave; neither would Joseph Rolfe. Yet in her heart she had been accusing these innocent children of stealing her father's watch!
"Miserable me!" thought Kyzie. "I must be very good to both of them now, to make up for my dreadful injustice!"
She went to Joe and sweetly offered to lend him her knife to whittle his lead pencil. He looked surprised. He did not know she had ever wronged him in her heart.
She wiped Henry's eyes on her own pocket handkerchief.
"Poor little cry-baby!" thought she. "I told my mother I would try to make a man of him, and now I mean to begin."
She walked part of the way home with him that afternoon. He considered it a great honor. She looked like a little girl, but her wish to help the child made her feel quite grown-up and very wise.