Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/153



OVE has had its romance from the beginning. Battle also; and of but little less renown. But Knowledge has had hers; albeit some of its chapters have been wrought out in plainest prose, and by the hidden and the lowly.

Hebron school-house was a small and sorry copy of Hebron church. Both were the barest of frame buildings, brown from time and weather, unpainted, and without bell or steeple, or glass in their windows. Except for an open space before the meeting-house door, and a path leading to it from the lonely red road, the forest girdled them into its solitude; and low mountains shut in all, their thick verdure tinged with a haze blue as indigo against the soft azure of the summer sky.

The old meeting-house looked well able to hold its own for another half-century; but its companion, of a much later date, showed already signs of decay. Its wooden shutters, flatly flung back against the stained weather-boarding, sagged low from their hinges. The uncouth door sagged too, and had worn a wide curve of a lighter color in the dark floor. Inside were the teacher's dingy pine table and split-bottomed chair, and the heavy homemade benches for the pupils, the boys sitting

on one side of the aisle that they formed and the girls on the other; but of other furnishing there was none, nor sign of stove or fireplace. School held for only a few weeks of summer, when crops were laid by, and when long mountain roads were not too long for little feet.

How many fingers have you on your right hand? How many on your left? How many on both?" The teacher read the questions with labored precision from Smith's Arithmetic. He was a round-shouldered young man with slate-colored hair and a sallow skin. The day was hot, and his slate-colored coat hung on a peg behind his chair.

"How many did you say?" he repeated in his authoritative monotone.

The little boy in the pink calico body and the patched trousers which reached down to his dusty ankles answered cheerfully,

"Four, and one thumb; four, and one thumb—ten in all," and then spread out his stubby fingers and looked at them attentively to make sure he could have made no mistake.

Word for word as they were printed in the book the questions sounded out into the sleepy air of the schoolroom. The little girl with the clear hazel eyes and the dark-brown hair, who was sitting quite at