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It produced a great effect, however; for even "teacher" was interested, and told such amazing tales of a juggler she once saw, that doughnuts were left forgotten in dinner-baskets, and wedges of pie remained suspended in the air for several minutes at a time, instead of vanishing with miraculous rapidity as usual.
At the first tinkle, like arrows dismissed from the bow-string, two girls belonging to the older class jumped from their seats and flew, ahead of all the rest, into the entry, where hung the hats and caps of the school, and their dinner-baskets.
And the children, delighted at the novelty of the thing, all started off "'possum-hunting," for Mammy was helping unpack the dinner-baskets, and was not watching them just then.
The cab which had brought our client was still waiting, and we were soon rattling through the streets towards the station, where we arrived in time to furnish ourselves with dinner-baskets and select our compartment at leisure. During the early part of the journey our companion was in excellent spirits.
Up from Lee, down from Little Stone Gap, and from over in Scott, came the valley-farmers horseback, in buggies, hacks, two-horse wagons, with wives, mothers, sisters, sweethearts, in white dresses, flowered hats, and many ribbons, and with dinner-baskets stuffed with good things to eat old ham, young chicken, angel-cake and blackberry wine to be spread in the sunless shade of great poplar and oak.
With a comfortable suit of clothes, a dollar in his pocket, and a row of dinner-baskets hanging in the school-house entry to supply him with provisions if he didn't mind stealing them, what was easier than to run away again?
These superannuated articles of furniture were now used in winter as places of deposit for the children's folded outer garments, rather than the cold vestibule. There, too, the dinner-baskets had their rightful quarters. The room was high, as it went up to the very roof.
Paintresses with their neat gloves and their dinner-baskets and their thin shoes were trudging to work, and young clerks and shop-assistants and the upper classes of labour generally. Everybody was in a hurry. The humbler mass had gone long ago. Miners had been in the earth for hours. Later, and more leisurely, the magnates would pass by. There were carriages about.
The magic so it seemed in its effects tolling of a deep-toned bell in the neighborhood would not allow them to doze long in their warm nooks, but, like the jealous monster in the fairy-tale, kept its captives always going, going, going, for its sixth stroke had not died away before they began to appear again, this time with the addition of fur hats and little dinner-baskets, and with no perceptible noses unless the existence of watery eyes above their mufflers argued the missing features to be in their proper places below and with an accelerated gait also an act of enchantment.
There was a district school-house not very far from Elmgrove, and in their rambles the children had made acquaintance with two or three of the scholars nice, quiet little girls who, after a while, got into the habit of bringing their dinner-baskets to the rendezvous by the brook-side, and spending their noon-recess with Elsie and Sophy; the dinner hour at Mr.
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