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There," said McLeod, pointing to a cottage with a pretty porch covered with woodbine, and a neat garden, in which many children were busily at work, "that house and that garden were the means of doing all the rest; that is our school-house.
The other ingredients of John Adams's ideal Commonwealth are no less significant of our national disposition. Take the school-house. It was planted in the wilderness for the training of boys and girls and for a future "godly and learned ministry." The record of American education is a long story of idealism which has touched literature at every turn.
Night by night, when the only light in the glen was the school-house lamp, of use at least as a landmark to solitary travellers who miss it nowadays, for it burns no more she hovered over him, nor did she deride his hopeless efforts, but rather, as she saw him go from black to gray and from gray to white in her service, were her luminous eyes sorrowful because she was not for him, and she bent impulsively toward him, so that once or twice in a long life he touched her fingers, and a heavenly spark was lit, for he had risen higher than himself, and that is literature.
And thus it came about that no one but a vagrant night-hawk, perched high on the top of the stack, remained near enough to hear the sawing sound of a dull knife-blade, making its way through cloth. IN the early morning hours, as the gray team jogged homeward past the deserted school-house, the big brothers and their mother discussed the wedding, the dancing, and the supper.
After the meeting, on the school-house steps, the big Captain, as if to atone for any unmanly exhibition of feeling into which he might have been betrayed inside, took little Bachelor Lot up by the shoulders, and gently and playfully held him suspended in mid-air, while he put to him the following riddle: "I'll wager a quarter, on a good, squar' guess, Bachelder.
In elevation, purity, nobility of nature, he is worthy to stand with the great poet and patriot, who began like him as a school-master, and ended as the teacher in a school-house which had for its walls the horizons of every region where English is spoken. The similarity of their characters might be followed by the curious into their fortunes.
He stole away at last when he thought no one was looking, and reached the back of the school-house at the open door of the girls' dressing-room, where he knew Titania would be posing in between the acts. He beckoned her to his side and began to question her in quick, eager, almost angry tones, as if the failure of their plans were her fault. Had her father been at home all day?
The village hall and the school-house were distinguished by superior size and green-glazed tile roofs; nor was a church, with a pointed belfry and weathercock, missing.
IT was only a little way to the school-house in the winter-time because the big brothers could cross the chain of sloughs to it on their skates; but, in the autumn, before the ice was thick, the path led snake-like beside the eastern border of the water, just skirting the frill of green bulrushes and tall marsh-grass, and it was a long distance.
Over at the school-house that night, when Miss Satterly's little, gold watch told her it was seven-thirty, she came out of the corner where she had been whispering with the Little Doctor and faced a select, anxious-eyed audience. Even Weary was not as much at ease as he would have one believe, and for the others they were limp and miserable. She went straight at her subject.
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