MRS. WALKER'S BETSEY.
It is now ten years since I spent a summer in the little village of Cliff Spring, as teacher in one of the public schools.
The village itself had no pretensions to beauty, natural or architectural; but all its surroundings were romantic and lovely. On one side was a winding river, bordered with beautiful willows; and on the other a lofty hill, thickly wooded. These woods, in spring and summer, were full of flowers and wild vines; and a clear, cold stream, that had its birth in a cavernous recess among the ledges, dashed over the rocks, and after many windings and plungings found its way to the river.
At the foot of the hill wound the railroad track, at some points nearly filling the space between the brook and the rocks, in others almost overhung by the latter. Some of the most delightful walks I ever knew were in this vicinity, and here the whole school would often come in the warm weather, for the Saturday's ramble.
It was on one of these summer rambles I first made the acquaintance of Mrs. Walker's Betsey. Not that her unenviable reputation had been concealed from my knowledge, by any means; but as she was not a member of my department, and was a very irregular attendant of any class, she had never yet come under my observation. I gathered that her parents had but lately come to live in Cliff Spring; that they were both ignorant and vicious; and that the girl was a sort of goblin sprite,—such a compound of mischief and malice as was never known before since the days of witchcraft. Was there an ugly profile drawn upon the anteroom wall, a green pumpkin found in the principal's hat, or an ink-bottle upset in the water-bucket? Mrs. Walker's Betsey was the first and constant object of suspicion. Did a teacher find a pair of tongs astride her chair, her shawl extra-bordered with burdocks, her gloves filled with some ill-scented weed, or her india-rubbers cunningly nailed to the floor? half a hundred juvenile tongues were ready to proclaim poor Betsey as the undoubted delinquent; and this in spite of the fact that very few of these misdemeanors were actually proved against her. But whether proved or not, she accepted their sponsorship all the same, and laughed at or defied her accusers, as her mood might be.
That the girl was a character in her way, shrewd and sensible, though wholly uncultured, I was well satisfied, from all I heard; that she was sly, intractable, and revengeful I believed, I am sorry to say, upon very insufficient evidence.
One warm afternoon in July, the sun, which at morning had been clouded, blazed out fiercely at the hour of dismissal. Shrinking from the prospect of an unsheltered walk, I looked around the shelves of the anteroom for my sunshade, but it was nowhere to be found. I did not recollect having it with me in the morning, and believed it had been left at the school-house over night. The girls of my class constituted themselves a committee of search and inquiry, but to no purpose. The article was not in the house or yard, and then my committee resolved themselves into a jury, and, without a dissenting voice, pronounced Mrs. Walker's Betsey guilty of cribbing my little, old-fashioned, but vastly useful sunshade. She had been seen loitering in the anteroom, and afterward running away in great haste. The charge seemed reasonable enough, but as I could not learn that Betsey had ever been caught in a theft, or convicted of one, I requested the girls to keep the matter quiet, for a few days at least: to which they unwillingly consented.
"Remember, Miss Burke," said Alice Way, as we parted at her father's gate, "you promised us a nice walk after tea, to the place in the wood where you found the beautiful phlox yesterday. We want you to guide us straight to the spot, please."
"Yes," added Mary Graham, "and we will take our Botanies in our baskets, and be prepared to analyze the flowers, you know."
My assent was not reluctantly given; and when the sun was low in the west we set forth, walking nearly the whole distance in the shade of the hill. We climbed the ridge, rested a few moments, and then started in search of the beautiful patch of Lichnidia—white, pink, and purple—that I had found the afternoon previous in taking a "short cut" over the hill to the house of a friend I was wont to visit.