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Updated: June 7, 2025
The kind people, among whom we had resided, expressed many kind wishes for our future welfare, when we left them to seek a home in the great city. The school which my mother opened upon our removal to the city proved very successful, and soon yielded us a comfortable support. I assisted my mother both in the duties of the school-room and also in our household work.
Were I inclined, I could trace the after-history of most of the companions whom I used daily to meet in this school-room. With many of them "life's history" is done, and they sleep peacefully in the grave. Others have gone forth to the duties of life; some far distant, others near their paternal homes.
They were in their school-room when I came upon them, and answered correctly, without book, such questions as where was England; how far was it; what was its population; its capital city; its form of government; and so forth.
Rigid as, in some respects, the discipline proper of the school may be, it does not compare with the severity of that maintained by the older boys over the younger ones. The code of the lesser, and almost independent, republic of the dormitory and the green is as clear in its terms as that of the unlimited monarchy of the school-room, and more potent in shaping the character.
After that 'the bastard' for such was the name they gave me was soon condemned to isolation. No one would associate with me during play-time. No one would sit beside me in the school-room. At the piano lesson, the girl who played after me pretended to wipe the keyboard carefully before commencing her exercises. I struggled bravely against this unjust ostracism; but all in vain.
But the altered circumstances of her life forced them momentarily upon herself nevertheless, as a burst pipe will spread its waters down a damask curtain. So far, during the eight years since she had left the school-room, she had always been "Miss Gresley," a little personage treated with consideration wherever she went, and choyée for her delicate humor and talent for conversation.
She, poor child, having lived all her life in a school-room, was quite ready to make a hero of any man that smiled kindly upon her; and here were four heroes, in handsome uniforms, all smiling upon her at once!
It come soft first, and hushed the school, and froze the scholars like statutes. Louder it come and louder a heavenly choir the melodium, the cordine, and the fiddle. Then a great white light flooded the school-room. It blinded the boys, and it blinded the girls.
Even I had to reconcile myself to it at first. 'Well! perhaps your school-room was larger, but remember how bare it was, how empty of anything but deal tables, and forms, and mats. Oh, indeed, Clare, I quite agree with mamma, who always says you have done very well for yourself; and Mr. Gibson too! What an agreeable, well- informed man!
I alone, as I think, of all mankind, remember one particular pailful of water, flavored with the white-pine of which the pail was made, and the brown mug out of which one Edmund, a red-faced and curly-haired boy, was averred to have bitten a fragment in his haste to drink; it being then high summer, and little full-blooded boys feeling very warm and porous in the low- "studded" school-room where Dame Prentiss, dead and gone, ruled over young children, many of whom are old ghosts now, and have known Abraham for twenty or thirty years of our mortal time.
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