windows. Perhaps this very barrenness gave to the poetry in our readers
an appeal that seems magical, certainly it threw over the faces of
Frances Babcock and Mary Abbie Gammons a lovelier halo.--They were "the
big girls" of the school, that is to say, they were seventeen or
eighteen years old,--and Frances was the special terror of the teacher,
a pale and studious pigeon-toed young man who was preparing for college.

In spite of the cold, the boys played open air games all winter. "Dog
and Deer," "Dare Gool" and "Fox and Geese" were our favorite diversions,
and the wonder is that we did not all die of pneumonia, for we battled
so furiously during each recess that we often came in wet with
perspiration and coughing so hard that for several minutes recitations
were quite impossible.--But we were a hardy lot and none of us seemed
the worse for our colds.

There was not much chivalry in the school--quite the contrary, for it
was dominated by two or three big rough boys and the rest of us took our
tone from them. To protect a girl, to shield her from remark or
indignity required a good deal of bravery and few of us were strong
enough to do it. Girls were foolish, ridiculous creatures, set apart to
be laughed at or preyed upon at will. To shame them was a great
joke.--How far I shared in these barbarities I cannot say but that I did
share in them I know, for I had very little to do with my sister Harriet
after crossing the school-house yard. She kept to her tribe as I to
mine.

This winter was made memorable also by a "revival" which came over the
district with sudden fury. It began late in the winter--fortunately, for
it ended all dancing and merry-making for the time. It silenced Daddy
Fairbanks' fiddle and subdued my mother's glorious voice to a wail. A
cloud of puritanical gloom settled upon almost every household. Youth
and love became furtive and hypocritic.

The evangelist, one of the old-fashioned shouting, hysterical,
ungrammatical, gasping sort, took charge of the services, and in his
exhortations phrases descriptive of lakes of burning brimstone and ages
of endless torment abounded. Some of the figures of speech and violent
gestures of the man still linger in my mind, but I will not set them
down on paper. They are too dreadful to perpetuate. At times he roared
with such power that he could have been heard for half a mile.

And yet we went, night by night, mother, father, Jessie, all of us. It
was our theate