bles should dare to raise their
thoughts to her. But she had some strenuous ideas on the rearing of
children, quite of the older sort. Life was softening somewhat, even for
childhood, but she did not approve of it.

CHAPTER VI

GOING TO SCHOOL

Elizabeth Leverett interviewed Dame Wilby beforehand. The woman came
half a day on Monday to wash and she hardly knew how to spend half an
hour, but when she found Miss Winn was going, she loftily relegated the
whole business to her.

Dame Wilby lived in an old rambling house, already an eyesore to the
finer houses in Lafayette Street, but the Dame was obstinate and would
not sell. "It was going to last her time out. She was born here when it
was only a lane, and she meant to be buried from here." Once it had been
quite a flourishing school; but newer methods had begun to supersede it.
It was handy for the small children about the neighborhood, it took them
over the troublesome times, it gave their mothers a rest, and kept them
out of mischief. And the old dames were thorough, as far as they went.
Indeed, some of the mothers had never gone any farther. They could cast
up accounts, they could weigh and measure, for they had learned all the
tables. They could spell and read clearly, they knew all the common arts
of life, and how to keep on learning out of the greater than printed
books--experience.

Dame Wilby might have been eighty. No one remembered her being young.
Her husband was lost at sea and she opened the school, worked in her
garden, saved until she had cleared her small old home, and now was
laying up a trifle every year. She was tall and somewhat bent in the
shoulders, very much wrinkled, with clear, piercing light blue eyes and
snowy hair. She always wore a cap and only a little line of it showed at
the edge of her high forehead. Her frocks were made in the plainest
style, skirts straight and narrow, and she always wore a little shoulder
shawl, pinned across the bosom--white in the summer, home-dyed blue in
the winter.

Some children were playing tag in the unoccupied lot next door. The
schoolroom door opened at the side. There were two rows of desks, with
benches for the older children, two more with no desks for the A B C and
spelling classes. The rest they learned in concert, orally. The dame had
a table covered with a gray woollen cloth, some books, an inkstand, a
holder for pens and pencils, and the never-failing switch.

"Yes," she answered to Mi