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Updated: June 17, 2025
The same long, bare halls and stairs, the recitation rooms with the same old blackboards and lumps of chalk taken for generation after generation, I suppose, from the same pit; the dining room, with its pillars inconveniently near some of the tables, with its thick, white crockery and black-handled knives, and viands that never suited us, because, forsooth, we had boxes of delicacies from home, or we had been out to the baker's or confectioner's and bought pies and cocoanut cakes, candy and chewing gum, all forbidden, but that added to the relish.
The same old map of North America hung tipsily between the blackboards. It had been crooked so long, that it seemed to be the correct position, and so had escaped the eye of the House-Committee, who had made many improvements for this occasion.
I went into the main room, where the tickers and blackboards were. As I approached through my outer office I could hear the noise the crowd was making as they cursed me. If you want to rile the very inmost soul of the average human being, don't take his reputation or his wife; just cause him to lose money. There were among my customers many with the true, even-tenored sporting instinct.
Smart young men, clad in the choicest raiment from the misfit counters, with greed stamped on their astute faces, bustle about, watch the blackboards, and make investments with each other. Middle-aged men in slouch hats lounge around with hungry eyes. The place is feverish rather than exciting.
In their eyes a man who alone was able and willing to wipe the name of a horse off the blackboards was a hero. To the horror of Dolly, instead of watching the horses parade past, the crowd gathered in front of her box and pointed and stared at her. From the club-house her men friends and acquaintances invaded it. "Has Carter gone mad?" they demanded.
Tetlow went to each room to tell the pupils and teachers to get ready for it, and to put certain work on the blackboards, so it could be seen. When the principal got to the room where Danny Rugg and his particular chums sat, Mr Tetlow, sniffing the air suspiciously, said: "I smell smoke!" "I have been noticing it, too," said the lady teacher. "Perhaps the furnace does not work properly."
There sits an operator, controlling an electric switchboard provided with one button for each floor member. When one of these buttons is pressed a flap swings down on the great wall blackboards and a white number flashes into sight. It stands for a while, then twinkles again into blackness, but in the meantime it has summoned its man to telephone communication with his office.
She was naturally bright and intelligent, but had come up in a day when the very book of the Christian's law was to her a sealed volume; but if she had not been educated through the aid of school books and blackboards, she had obtained that culture of manners and behavior which comes through contact with well-bred people, close observation and a sense of self-respect and self-reliance, and when deprived of her husband's help by an untimely death, she took up the burden of life bravely and always tried to keep up what she called "a stiff upper lip."
Tired of the bells, and the whispering, and the shuffling feet, of the books that smelled of pencil-dust and ink and little dusty fingers; tired of the blackboards, cleaned in great irregular scallops by small and zealous arms; of the clear-ticking big clock; of little girls who sulked, and little girls who cried after hours in the hall because they had lost their lunch baskets or their overshoes, and little girls who had colds in their heads, and no handkerchiefs.
Whereupon they all began drawing graves, tombstones, weeping willows, and all such funereal paraphernalia upon the blackboards. It was a solemn scene, save for my own irrepressible laughter, which they thought very unaccountable when they learned that I must suffer a like fate.
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