Page:Emily of New Moon by L. M. Montgomery.pdf/319

 could not find an oasis, and then drank so much that he took terrible cramps and Aunt Laura had to be up all night with him—you did not forget where the said desert was. The trustees were quite scandalized over some of the goings on and felt sure that the children were having too good a time to be really learning anything.

If you wanted to learn Latin and French you had to do it by talking your exercises, not writing them, and on Friday afternoons all lessons were put aside and Mr. Carpenter made the children recite poems, make speeches and declaim passages from Shakespeare and the Bible. This was the day Ilse loved. Mr. Carpenter pounced on her gift like a starving dog on a bone and drilled her without mercy. They had endless fights and Ilse stamped her foot and called him names while the other pupils wondered why she was not punished for it but at last had to give in and do as he willed. Ilse went to school regularly—something she had never done before. Mr. Carpenter had told her that if she were absent for a day without good excuse she could take no part in the Friday “exercises” and this would have killed her.

One day Mr. Carpenter had picked up Teddy’s slate and found a sketch of himself on it, in one of his favourite if not exactly beautiful attitudes. Teddy had labelled it “The Black Death”—half of the pupils of the school having died that day of the Great Plague, and having been carried out on stretchers to the Potter’s Field by the terrified survivors.

Teddy expected a roar of denunciation, for the day before Garrett Marshall had been ground into figurative pulp on being discovered with the picture of a harmless cow on his slate—at least, Garrett said he meant it for a cow. But now this amazing Mr. Carpenter only drew his beetling brows together, looked earnestly at Teddy’s slate, put it down on the desk, looked at Teddy, and said,

“I don’t know anything about drawing—I can’t help