Page:Pratt portraits - sketched in a New England suburb (IA prattportraitssk00full).pdf/193

 You'd a sight better do it than to have Mary turn out an old maid. There's Eliza Pelham, now. She acted jest so when she was Mary's age, and she'll teach school to the end of the chapter. She got so set in her waysand so high-flyin' in her notions that the Gov'nor himself wouldn't have suited her. You mark my words, Mary'll be an old maid, jest like Eliza. You see 'f she ain't."

And if Mary herself had been asked, she would have been the first to admit the reasonableness of her grandmother's predictions. She had never been so happy in her life as she was the day on which she stepped upon the platform at school and assumed the responsibilities of "schoolmarm." Mary William loved to teach, and she loved also to rule—an art which she understood to perfection. There were some pretty black sheep among her flock, but before she had had them a month they had learned a lesson in wholesome discipline which seemed to them much more incontrovertible than anything Murray had to say against alliances between plural subjects and singular verbs, or any of Greenleaf's arithmetical theories. The new teacher's success made so strong an impression upon the school committee that by Christmas-time Miss Pratt's name was mentioned in connection with a $500 vacancy to occur the coming year in the high-school. Meanwhile Mary revelled in her independence; and if she thought of matrimony in