United States or Montserrat ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
But 'Tenty had her father's firm and sunny character; she never cried but for good reason, and then screamed lustily and was over with it; fretting was out of the question, she did not know how; her special faults were a strong will and a dogged obstinacy, faults Miss 'Viny trained, instead of eradicating; so that 'Tenty emerged from district-school into the "'Cademy's" higher honors as healthy and happy an individual as ever arrived at the goodly age of fourteen without a silk dress or a French shoe to peacock herself withal.
Some of the younger men had their heads together, in a corner, about the tin-peddler, who was telling stories of people he had met in his journeys, which brought out repeated bursts of laughter. In the corner farthest from Eli, a delicate-looking man began to tell the butcher about Eli's wife. "Twelve years ago this fall," he said, "I taught district-school in the parish where she lived.
My winters, up to the age of about sixteen, were given to school, the common district-school, and my summers, to assisting my father on the farm; after that, for a year or two, my whole time was devoted to preparing for college. For this purpose I went first, for one year, to a school taught in Sheffield by Mr. William H. Maynard, afterwards an eminent lawyer and senator in the State of New York.
In a country district-school patches were not by any means a sign of poverty, but of the boy's courage and adventurous disposition. Our elders used to threaten to dress us in leather and put sheet-iron seats in our trousers. The boy said that he wore out his trousers on the hard seats in the schoolhouse ciphering hard sums.
But the letters he wished to write were not the sort he cared to have read to the girl by the evangelist-doctor or the district-school teacher, and alone she could have made nothing of them. However, "I love you" are easy words and those he always included.
This magazine was edited by two young women, both of whom had been employed in the mills, although at that time the were teachers in the public schools a change which was often made by mill-girls after a few months' residence at Lowell. A great many of them were district-school teachers at their homes in the summer, spending only the winters at their work.
Word Of The Day