the tell-tale pail dangling at his belt, he does not escape so
easily the inquisitive Aunt Eliza.

The excellent Miss Onthank--for by this title the parson always
compliments her--is a type of a schoolmistress which is found no longer:
grave, stately, with two great moppets of hair on either side her brow,
(as in the old engravings of Louis Philippe's good queen Amelia,) very
resolute, very learned in the boundaries of all Christian and heathen
countries, patient to a fault, with a marvellous capacity for pointing
out with her bodkin every letter to some wee thing at its first stage of
spelling, and yet keeping an eye upon all the school-room; reading a
chapter from the Bible, and saying a prayer each morning upon her bended
knees,--the little ones all kneeling in concert,--with an air that would
have adorned the most stately prioress of a convent; using her red
ferule betimes on little, mischievous, smarting hands, yet not
over-severe, and kind beneath all her gravity. She regards Adele with a
peculiar tenderness, and hopes to make herself the humble and unworthy
instrument of redeeming her from the wicked estate in which she has
been reared. And Adele, though not comprehending the excess of her zeal,
and opening her eyes in great wonderment when the good woman talks about
her "providential deliverance from the artful snares of the adversary,"
is as free in her talk with the grave mistress as if she were her mother
confessor.

Phil and Reuben, being the oldest boys of the school, resent the
indignity of being still subject to woman rule by a concerted series of
rebellious outbreaks. Some six or eight months after the arrival of
Adele upon the scene, this rebel attitude culminates in an incident that
occasions a change of programme. The rebels on their way to school espy
a few clam-shells before some huckster's door, and, putting two or three
in their pockets, seize the opportunity when the good lady's eyes are
closed in the morning prayer to send two or three scaling about the
room, which fall with a clatter among the startled little ones. One,
aimed more justly by Reuben, strikes the grave mistress full upon the
forehead, and leaves a red cut from which one or two beads of blood
trickle down.

Adele, who has not learned yet that obstinate closing of the eyes which
most of the scholars have been taught, and to whom the sight recalls the
painted heads of martyrs in an old church at Marseilles, gives a little
hysteri