When they have satisfied themselves with sweets for the time, at least, they fall to playing games—such old-fashioned amusements as Twenty Questions, Consequences, Dumb Crambo, or the livelier Fox and Geese and Blindman's Buff. Occasionally Parcheesi, Lotto, and Backgammon will have their devotees, and rarely there will be games of cards. The party does not continue to a late hour. There must be a final sugaring off before the assembly breaks up for the night and muffle themselves for their long trudge homeward in the white moonlight or under the solemn stars.
[AN "OLD-FIELD" SCHOOL-GIRL.]
BY MARION HARLAND.
CHAPTER I.
Everybody spoke of it as an "old-field school"; but the only field in sight was one hundred acres in extent and always under cultivation. On the early October morning with which my story begins it was tender green with fall wheat growing fast under the warm Virginia sunshine. A "worm-fence" of rails separated it from the copse of sassafras and chinquapin bushes and scrub-oaks, beyond which was the clearing lying about the school-house door. Many generations of scholars had trampled this area into dust that had not put forth a blade of grass in the month's vacation just ended. But for two tough-lived aspens planted close to the steps of the small building there was not a sign of vegetation nearer to it than the belt of brushwood. The school-house was built of hewn logs, chinked with bits of wood half as long and twice as thick as a shingle. The spaces between these billets were filled in with mortar in which there was much red clay and little lime. Sun, rain, and wind had bleached the mortar to a dirty pink and darkened the logs to grayish-black. Upon two sides of the one-roomed building were windows running horizontally two-thirds of the way across the walls, and but one pane deep. A log had been sawed out, and a single long sash fitted into the space thus left. The sash hung from hinges made fast to the log above it, and when closed was hooked down to hasps set in the lower log. The inner walls and ceiling were plastered with the warmly colored mortar used in filling up the chinks. As far up as a boy could reach by standing upon a bench the mottled surface was covered with pencillings and charcoal scrawls. There was but one movable desk; that stood at the head of the room. It had a hinged cover with a padlock attached to it, and a wooden arm-chair was beside it. The rest of the room was furnished with backless benches of unpainted pine mellow-brown with age, a big stove at the right of the teacher's chair, and a row of tall stools ranged in front of a sloping shelf made fast to the wall behind the desk. Upon these the scholars sat when they had their writing-lessons.
A locust—"a dry-weather fly," the people thereabouts called it—had perched on the sill of the sunniest window, and sang shrilly. But for his chirp the room was very still until two men pushed back the door and strolled up the aisle. Their steps started up queer echoes, like whispers and titters, that chased one another from one corner to another; the locust stopped singing.
"Mrs. Duncombe sent a couple of women over yesterday to sweep and scrub," said the elder of the men. "It all looks fairly decent, I think."
He seated himself upon the teacher's desk, swinging one leg over a corner of it, the other foot upon the floor, and looked around the room, a smile half-humorous, half-pensive showing his white teeth and lighting up his eyes. He had a noble face; his age may have been fifty; his hair was iron-gray. As from the force of early habit he had pulled off his hat at the door, and now held it in his left hand, while with his right he tapped his boot with his riding-whip. This was Major Duncombe, of Greenfield, a fine specimen of the Virginia planter of 1840.
"All the learning I carried with me to college was flogged into me here," he went on, musingly. "Old Byars Lowton reigned supreme from this desk then. I have heard my father say that when Byars applied for the place, Colonel Barton, of Hurley, my nearest neighbor, said to him, 'Young gentleman, you are young and inexperienced. We should like to know something of your proposed principles of government. How do you mean to manage your school?' 'By switch and suasion, sir,' said Byars; 'specially switch.' The speech got him a berth he held for forty years, and in all that time his hand never lost its cunning"—laughing good-humoredly.