Ernest was just his opposite. He was a
chunky boy with white hair and pale eyes. He was a nice boy when let
alone, but in the whole fifteen years of his life he'd never had no
call to bound Kansas or tell the capital of Californy outside of school
hours, so he regarded Leander with a fierce and childlike hatred. But
Ernest had a noble streak in him, too. For himself he would 'a'
suffered in silence. It was the constant oppression of the helpless
little ones that saddened him. It was maddenin' to have to sit silent
every day while tiny girls, no older than ten, was being hounded from
one end of the g'ography to the other. He seen small boys, shavers
under eight, scratchin' holes in their heads with slate-pencils, tryin'
to make out why two and two was four; he seen girls, be-yutiful young
girls of his own age, drove almost to distraction by black-boards full
of diagrams from the grammar-book. And allus before him, the inspirin'
note of the whole systematic system of torturin' the young, was the
rod; broodin' over it all, like a black cloud, was Leander's
repytation, was the memory of the boys as had gone before. For years
Ernest bore all this. Then come a time when he was called to a
position of responsibility in the school. One after another, the
biggest boys had fallen. A few had gradyeated. Others had argyed with
the teacher and become as broken reeds, was stedyin' regular and bein'
polite like. In them years, whether he wanted it or not, Ernest had
rose up. His repytation was spotless. His age entitled him to the
Fifth Reader class, but he was still spellin' out words in the Third;
fractions was only a dream to him, and he couldn't 'a' told you the
difference between a noun and a wild carrot. But through it all he'd
been so humble and polite that Leander looked on him as a kind of
half-witted lamb."

[Illustration: Leander.]

"This here is the longest fairy story I ever heard tell of," said Elmer
Spiker, "We haven't even had a sign of the prin-cess."

"And there is a prin-cess in this here le-gend," returned Josiah. "She
was a be-yutiful one, too. Her name was Pinky Binn, a dotter of the
house of Binn, the Binns of Turkey Walley. She had the reddish hair of
the Binns and the pearl-blue eyes of the Rummelsbergers from over the
mountains. Her ma was a Rummelsberger. She wasn't too spare, nor was
she too fleshy; she was just rounded right; and when she smiled--ah,
boys, when Pinky Binn smiled