DEAR SIR:
I regret to discover that you lack moral principles.
ANGELINA LANCE.
Just before the last bell the janitor brought in a prisoner for her custody. Willie Downey's head was bloody but unbowed; three seventh-graders he had vanquished in one round. "They guyed me," said he. "They called me a Nawthour."
Morning prayer and song waited while teacher and pupil spoke earnestly of many things; while the teacher's eyes filled with tears, and the pupil's heart filled with high resolve to bring home the baseball championship of the Ashland Public School League and lay it at Miss Angelina's feet, or perish in the attempt.
V
The A. Lincoln Wilbram prize went to a small boy named Aaron Levinsky whose English was 99 per cent. pure. Little Aaron's essay was printed as the centre-piece in Wilbram, Prescott & Co.'s page in the Bee; little Aaron invested his gold in thrift-stamps, and the tumult and the shouting died.
Miss Angelina Lance sat alone every evening of the week. True, Mr. Sloan had tried to right the wrong; he had called Miss Angelina on the telephone, which he should have known was an inadequate thing to do; he had also sent a ten-dollar bank-note to Willie, in care of Miss Lance at the Hilldale School, together with his warm felicitations upon Willie's success as a littérateur. Did Willie know that his fine first effort had been reprinted, with proper credit, in the great New York Planet?
True, too, the illustrious D.K.T. had written Miss Angelina an abject apology, most witty and poetic, taking all the blame to himself and more than exonerating his high-principled friend Mr. Sloan.
But the bank-note went back to its donor without even a rejection slip; and D.K.T.'s humour was fatal to his client's cause. Ghastly are they who jest in the shadow of tragedy. Mr. Sloan and D.K.T. did not know, of course—Miss Angelina had not thought it of any use to tell them—of the sword which they had hung up by a thread above the heads of the Downeys.