folds of the big feather bed for another trip into
delicious dreamland, and would hurry from his warm nest to attend to
his morning chores, so that as soon as the early breakfast was over he
could hasten through the snow-covered fields to the schoolhouse. There
he would pile the fagots high in the big fireplace, eager to have them
blazing and crackling before the clap of the master's ferule upon his
desk at eight o'clock should summon the school to its daily work.

Cane Ridge school, under the gentle yet energetic sway of Abner Dudley,
presented a busy scene. The click of the soapstone pencil upon the
frameless slate, the scratch of the quill pen across the bespattered
copybook, the shrill tone of the solitary reader as he stood with the
rest of the class "toeing the mark" before the master, or the shriller
tones of the arithmetic class reciting in concert the multiplication
table, kept up a pleasant discord throughout the short day. The rear
guard of this army of busy workers, the rows of chubby-faced little
boys in short-legged pants and long-sleeved aprons, and of rosy-cheeked
little girls in linsey dresses and nankeen pantalets, sat on their slab
benches, droning mechanically "a-b, ab; e-b, eb," and looked with
wonder at the middle rank of this army, adding up long columns of
figures or singing the long list of capitals. Those of the middle rank,
in their turn, as they gave place before the master's desk to the three
bright pupils of the vanguard, wondered no less to see them performing
strange maneuvers called "parsing and conjugating," or battling
successfully against Tare and Tret, or that still more insidious foe,
Vulgar Fractions. Ahead of this vanguard, on a far-off, dizzy peak of
erudition, was Betsy Gilcrest, the courageous color-bearer of the
army--actually speaking in an unknown tongue called Latin, and
executing surprising feats of legerdemain with that strange trio, x, y
and z, who had somehow escaped from their lowly position at the tail
end of the alphabet, to play unheard-of antics and to assume characters
utterly bewildering.

There was not one of those fifty pupils who did not soon find a warm
place in the master's heart; but, though he took care by special
kindness to the others to hide his partiality, yet soon pre-eminent in
his regard were the four advanced pupils, Henry and Susan Rogers,
plodding, thoughtful, thorough; John Calvin Gilcrest, shrewd,
retentive, independent; and Betsy Gilcrest, br