which she
was not slow to communicate.

"Abe," she whispered, "look there!"

"Blue-nose Crawford," whispered the tall boy, "as I live!"

In a few moments the school was all eyes and mouths. Blue-nose Crawford
bore the reputation of being a very hard taskmaster, and of holding to
the view that severe discipline was one of the virtues that wisdom ought
to visit upon the youth. He once lent to Abraham Lincoln Weems's "Life
of Washington." The boy read it with absorbing interest, but there came
a driving storm, and the rain ran in the night through the walls of the
log-cabin and wet and warped the cover of the book. Blue-nose Crawford
charged young Lincoln seventy-five cents for the damage done to the
book. "Abe," as he was called, worked three days, at twenty-five cents a
day, pulling fodder, to pay the fine. He said, long after this hard
incident, that he did his work well, and that, although his feelings
were injured, he did not leave so much as a strip of fodder in the
field.

"The class in reading may take their places," said Andrew Crawford.

It was a tall class, and it was provided with leather-covered English
Readers. One of the best readers in the class was a Miss Roby, a girl of
some fifteen years of age, whom young Lincoln greatly liked, and whom he
had once helped at a spelling match, by putting his finger on his eye
(_i_) when she had spelled _defied_ with a _y_. This girl read a
selection with real pathos.

"That gal reads well," said Blue-nose Crawford, or Josiah Crawford, as
he should be called. "She ought to keep school. We're goin' to need
teachers in Indiana. People are comin' fast."

Miss Roby colored. She had indeed won a triumph of which every pupil of
Spencer County might be proud.

"Now, Nathaniel, let's hear you read. You're a strappin' feller, and you
ought not to be outread by a gal."

Nathaniel raised his book so as to hide his face, like one near-sighted.
He spread his legs apart, and stood like a drum-major awaiting a word of
command.

"You may read Section V in poetry," said Mr. Crawford, the teacher.
"Verses supposed to be written by Alexander Selkirk. Speak up loud, and
mind your pauses."

He did.

"I am monarch of all I survey," he began, in a tone of vocal thunder.
Then he made a pause, a very long one. Josiah Crawford turned around in
great surprise; and Aunt Olive planted the chair in which she had been
sitting at a different angle, so that she could scrutinize the reader