s pretty well; and I was
certain that she cared nothing about Jo, while Jo could swear that she
counted me not worth a button.

So I told Jo Kettle about the Haunted House, and he was for starting off
there and then. But it was perfectly evident that I could not with these
fifth class boys to look after, and afternoon school just beginning. And
if I could not, I was very sure that he had better not. More than once
or twice I had proved that it was his duty to do as I said. Jo
understood this, but grew so excited that he bolted into school in a
moment with the noise of a runaway colt. His entrance disarranged the
attention of the senior Latiners of the sixth. My father frowned, and
said, "What do you mean, boy, by tumbling through the classroom door
like a cart of bricks? Come quietly; and sit down, Agnes Anne!"

This was my poor unfortunate sister, aged fourteen, whom a pitiless
parent compelled to do classics with the senior division.

Jo Kettle sat down and pawed about for his mensuration book, which he
studied for some time upside down. Then he extracted his box of
instruments from his bag and set himself to do over again a proposition
with which he had been familiar for weeks. This, however, was according
to immemorial school-boy habit, and sometimes succeeded with my father,
who was dreamy wherever the classics were not concerned, and regarded a
mere land-measuring agricultural scholar as outside the bounds of human
interest, if not of Christian charity.

In two minutes my father was again immersed in Horace, which (with
Tacitus) was his chief joy. Then Jo leaned nearer to Agnes Anne and
whispered the dread news about the Haunted House. My sister paled,
gasped, and clutched at the desk. Jo, fearful that she would begin,
according to the sympathetic school phrase, "to cluck like a hen,"
threatened first to run the point of his compasses into her if she did
not sit up instantly; and then, this treatment proving quite inadequate
to the occasion, he made believe to pour ink upon her clean cotton
print, fresh put on that morning. This brought Agnes Anne round, and,
with a face still pale, she asked for details. Jo supplied them in a
voice which the nearness of my father reduced to a whisper. He sat with
his fingers and thumbs making an isosceles triangle and his eyes gently
closed, while he listened to the construing of Fred Esquillant, the
pale-faced genius of the school. At such times my father almost purred
with