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Updated: July 1, 2025
It was nearly a mile from the schoolhouse to the woods, and yet on winter afternoons no school-ma'am could keep the boys from using school hours to dig out the screw-holes and heel-plates of their boots before wadding them with paper.
The next morning he returned and, as he was this time alone, he bestowed his conversation upon us with great liberality. He prided himself on his intelligence; asked us if we knew the school-ma'am. He didn't think much of her, anyway. He had tried her, he had. He had put a question to her. If a tree a hundred feet high were to fall a foot a day, how long would it take to fall right down?
Jeminy some news; but it occurred to him that it was no more than a rumor. Finally he said: "There's a new school-ma'am over to North Adams." He cocked his head sidewise to look at the schoolmaster. "She knows more than you, Jeminy," he said. Mr. Jeminy sat bowed and still, his hands folded in his lap.
"And now for another matter which involves a girl, Eloise Smith. Who is she, you ask? Well, she is neither high born, I fancy, nor city bred; nor much like the girls from Wellesley and Lasell, with whom we used to flirt. She is a country school-ma'am, and is to be graduated this month in the Normal School in Mayville, where you are visiting. What is she to me?
If there's any region on the face of the earth that I detest, it's New England; and if there is one type of women that I'd shun as I would 'ever angry bears, it's a New England school-ma'am." "'But if thy flight lay toward the raging sea' of a restless, all-absorbing passion, 'Thou'dst meet the bear I' the mouth, as you will try to in this case.
It was time to go to bed, and, without saying good-night, the different members retired to their allotted quarters, Mr. and Mrs. Sapp to the bed by the fireplace, Jack and Charley to one bed in the back part of the room, and Mary and the school-ma'am to the other. Thus, with few variations, the days passed until the first week of school had gone.
Miss Trueman, who possessed the characteristic veneration of the bred and born New Englander for his native or imported school-ma'am, resented persistently their somewhat patronizing attitude toward the profession second only to the ministry in her stanch respect.
Sarah Gurridge looked over in the girl's direction and shook an admonitory forefinger at her. "Mr. Grey, my dear you were thinking of Mr. Grey, in spite of your lover's tiff." "Who did you say?" asked Hervey, with a quick glance at Prudence. "Leslie Grey," said his mother, before the old school-ma'am could reply. "Didn't our Prudence tell you when she wrote? He's the man she's going to marry.
This to her credit, however: she did, ultimately, labor hard with the boy, and tried her best to do something with him, or for him, or by him, but all to little purpose. It seemed to be "Dodd's" special mission to knock in the head the pet theories of this hand-made school-ma'am. She had him up to read on the afternoon of the first day of his attendance at school.
All the school-ma'am in her leaped to his teaching. What he needed was a superior person like herself. She loved him, and she deliberately put her arms about his neck and lifted her face to be kissed. Back by the place of the Silver Fleece they wandered, across the Big Road, up to the mansion. On the steps stood John Taylor and Helen Cresswell hand in hand and they all smiled at each other.
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