he teacher's desk, in the little roadside school-house, there was
a bunch of Mayflowers, beside a dented and bent brass bell, a small
Worcester's Dictionary without any cover, and a worn morocco-covered
Bible. These were placed in an orderly row, and behind them was a
small wooden box which held some broken pieces of blackboard crayon.
The teacher, whom no timid new scholar could look at boldly, wore her
accustomed air of authority and importance. She might have been
nineteen years old,--not more,--but for the time being she scorned the
frivolities of youth.

The hot May sun was shining in at the smoky small-paned windows;
sometimes an outside shutter swung to with a creak, and eclipsed the
glare. The narrow door stood wide open, to the left as you faced the
desk, and an old spotted dog lay asleep on the step, and looked wise
and old enough to have gone to school with several generations of
children. It was half past three o'clock in the afternoon, and the
primer class, settled into the apathy of after-recess fatigue,
presented a straggling front, as they stood listlessly on the floor.
As for the big boys and girls, they also were longing to be at
liberty, but the pretty teacher, Miss Marilla Hender, seemed quite as
energetic as when school was begun in the morning.

The spring breeze blew in at the open door, and even fluttered the
primer leaves, but the back of the room felt hot and close, as if it
were midsummer. The children in the class read their lessons in those
high-keyed, droning voices which older teachers learn to associate
with faint powers of perception. Only one or two of them had an
awakened human look in their eyes, such as Matthew Arnold delighted
himself in finding so often in the school-children of France. Most of
these poor little students were as inadequate, at that weary moment,
to the pursuit of letters as if they had been woolly spring lambs on a
sunny hillside. The teacher corrected and admonished with great
patience, glancing now and then toward points of danger and
insurrection, whence came a suspicious buzz of whispering from behind
a desk-lid or a pair of widespread large geographies. Now and then a
toiling child would rise and come down the aisle, with his forefinger
firm upon a puzzling word as if it were an unclassified insect. It was
a lovely beckoning day out-of-doors. The children felt like captives;
there was something that provoked rebellion in the droning voices, the
buzzing of an