llow their example. It was hard
for a Stanley to have to follow a Mills in anything. So they stood
out for a year. As it seemed, however, that the Millses were getting
something to which the Stanleys were as much entitled as they, one
morning little Darby Stanley walked in at the door, and without taking
his hat off, announced that he had come to go to school. He was
about fifteen at the time, but he must have been nearly six feet (his
sobriquet being wholly due to the fact that Big Darby was older, not
taller), and though he was spare, there was something about his face
as he stood in the open door, or his eye as it rested defiantly on the
teacher's face, which prevented more than a general buzz of surprise.

"Take off your hat," said the teacher, and he took it off slowly. "I
suppose you can read?" was the first question.

"No."

A snicker ran round the room, and little Darby's brow clouded.

As he not only could not read, but could not even spell, and in fact did
not know his letters, he was put into the alphabet class, the class of
the smallest children in the school.

Little Darby walked over to the corner indicated with his head up, his
hands in his pockets, and a roll in his gait full of defiance, and took
his seat on the end of the bench and looked straight before him. He
could hear the titter around him, and a lowering look came into his blue
eyes. He glanced sideways down the bench opposite. It happened that the
next seat to his was that of Vashti Mills, who was at that time just
nine. She was not laughing, but was looking at Darby earnestly, and as
he caught her eye she nodded to him, "Good-mornin'." It was the first
greeting the boy had received, and though he returned it sullenly, it
warmed him, and the cloud passed from his brow and presently he looked
at her again. She handed him a book. He took it and looked at it as if
it were something that might explode.

He was not an apt scholar; perhaps he had begun too late; perhaps there
was some other cause; but though he could swim better, climb better,
and run faster than any boy in the school, or, for that matter, in the
county, and knew the habits of every bird that flitted through the woods
and of every animal that lived in the district, he was not good at his
books. His mind was on other things. When he had spent a week over the
alphabet, he did know a letter as such, but only by the places on the
page they were on, and gave up when "big A" was shown