the nicest thing that ever happened to a little girl eight years old was going to happen to ella, and she was so delighted that she could hardly sit still in the big clumsy stage-coach that rolled and shook and swung slowly away from the city. uphill and downhill it went, past ponds and meadows and brooks and woods, and little new houses and big old homesteads shaded by ancient elms or maples. every roll of the wheels brought the little passenger nearer to perfect happiness.
ella was going to live in a seminary, and surely nothing could be more charming than that. she knew all about seminaries, for she had visited one when she was little—at least two years before. the girls had petted her and given her candy; the principal had presented her with a story-book. best of all, she had slept in an old-fashioned bed with a canopy, such a bed as she had never seen anywhere else. what could be more delightful! and now she was going to have every day such pleasures as these, and no one knew how much more marvelous ones.
by and by the stage came to a scattered village with a church or two, a schoolhouse, and a post-office. after the mail had been left, the driver turned up a long avenue with fields and a line of trees on either hand. at the head of the avenue was a circle of tall fir trees, and back of the circle was a large white building with a wing at each end, a narrow piazza in front, and tall fluted columns rising from its floor to the top of the second story.
the driver called “whoa!” a tall man came from somewhere and shook hands with ella’s mother and with herself. then he led the way upstairs to some bare, almost unfurnished rooms. the mother was to use the furniture from her old home, and it had not yet arrived. after a little talk, they all went down some dark and winding stairs to the dining-room, a large, low, gloomy basement room with two long tables. the end of one of them was “set,” and there ella and her mother and the tall man and two or three other grown-ups ate supper.
a little later ella and her mother went up to the almost unfurnished rooms. ella stood looking through the open door down the lonely corridor. there were no nice girls about; there was no canopy to the bed; there were no story-books; there was no one to talk to her. everybody was grown up; there were no children. there were no city lights, and the twilight seemed to be shutting down faster than it ever did before.
“oh, this doesn’t seem one bit, not one single bit, like a seminary,” ella cried.
the mother gathered her into her lap, and there the little girl sobbed away her loneliness and disappointment, and forgot it all in sleep. but the mother sat beside the window, looking out into the darkness and the past; for it was here that she and the father had first met, in the old joyful student days; and now he was gone, and she had come back, alone, to teach students who were, as she had then been, at the happy beginnings.
when the morning came, things were better, ella thought. the sun shone, and people began to gather. the first arrivals were teachers and boy and girl students. then came students of earlier days, for the seminary had been closed for some years and was now to be reopened. there were people from the village and the neighboring country, and a little later, when the stage from the city drove up, there were a number of dignified middle-aged men with long beards. these men were to make speeches.
the mother was helping to welcome the guests, and ella wandered around alone. before long she met a boy a little smaller than herself. the two children looked at each other.
“what’s your name?” the boy asked.
“ella. what’s yours?”
“john. my father’s the principal. what did you have christmas?”
“i had a doll and a bedstead for her and a book of fairy stories,” the little girl replied. “what did you have?”
“i had a sled and a rubber ball and some red mittens.”
“i had a sled three christmases ago, when i was little,” said ella. “its name is thomas jefferson. how old are you?”
“six. but i’m going on seven,” he added quickly.
ella was eight, going on nine, and she thought that a boy who was only six was hardly more than a baby; but he was better than nobody, so they spent most of the day together.
it was a full day. the hundreds of people went through the building; they ate a collation in the basement dining-room; they renewed old friendships; and at two o’clock they assembled in the little grove fronting the main door to listen to the speeches.
and speeches there were, indeed; speeches on the old days of the seminary and on the plans for its future; and of course there was one on “the true theory of education,” delivered by the man who knew least about that subject. the lieutenant-governor of the state sent a check for $100 for the library; the mayor of the capital of the state sent one for $250. ticknor & fields, little & brown, and wendell phillips all presented books. everybody was jubilant, and sunset was only one hour distant when with three hearty cheers for the seminary the people said good-bye to[pg 5] one another, and all but the teachers and the students started for their homes.
ella had not heard any of the speeches, but she had found where early goldenrod and asters were growing; she had learned that there was a beautiful lake whose shore was a fine place to pick up pebbles and go in wading; and she had discovered on the hastily arranged shelves of the library some books that looked interesting. she and john had only one grievance, namely, that the watermelon had given out before it came to their end of the table.
the next day classes were arranged and the regular life of the seminary began. ella was delighted to find that she was to be called a “student” just as if she had been grown up, and when a young man, already lonesome for the little sister at home, asked her to sit on his knee, she refused. it was of course quite proper for a little girl to sit on the knee of an elderly gentleman, as he seemed to her, but she did not think that one “student” ought to sit on the knee of another.
ella’s mother had her own “theory of education.” she thought that it was better for young children to be out of doors than in a schoolroom, and that, when they began to study, arithmetic and foreign languages should come first. ella had never been to school or been taught at home. somehow, she had learned to read, no one knew exactly how, and she had read every book that had come to hand if it looked at all[pg 6] interesting. one of these books was a small arithmetic. it was quite the fashion in those days to bind schoolbooks in paper of a bright salmon pink. ella liked the color, and the result was that she had picked up some familiarity with addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.
the professor of mathematics was a courteous, scholarly young man just out of college. he said that it would not trouble him in the least to have in one of his classes a little girl in a short-sleeved, low-necked blue muslin dress and “ankle-ties.” apparently the tall young men and young women students did not object either; and the result was that for half an hour every morning ella made groups of straggling figures on the blackboard, and with the kindly teaching of “my professor,” as she proudly called the young instructor, she learned to “invert the divisor and proceed as in multiplication.” she learned also that a decimal point has an uncanny power to reduce a comfortable number of dollars to mere copper cents. she even learned that “if a student purchased a latin grammar for $0.75, a virgil for $3.75, a greek lexicon for $4.75, a homer for $1.25, an english dictionary for $3.75, and a greek testament for $0.75,” the whole cost of his purchases would amount to $15. this was her favorite among the “practical problems.” the teacher never guessed the reason, but it was because she had read a story about a carrier pigeon, and she was glad that the student had a “homer.”
ella learned that “cwt.” meant hundredweight, that “d” meant penny, and that a queer sign somewhat like a written “l” meant pound. why these things should be, she had no idea; she supposed grown people had just made them up. she could overlook even such foolishness as this, but she did draw the line at learning the multiplication table. it was in her book, and she could turn to it at any time, so why should she bother to learn it? the young professor was always charitable to a new idea. he looked at the child thoughtfully; maybe she was in the right. at any rate, he only smiled when he saw how rapidly a certain page in her arithmetic was wearing out. before it had quite disappeared, the multiplication table, even with the eights and nines, was as firmly fixed in the small pupil’s memory as if she had learned it with tears and lamentations.
ella spelled rather unusually well, perhaps because in all her eight years she had seldom seen or heard a word spelled incorrectly; but her handwriting was about as bad as it could be, especially toward the end of the page, where the “loops and tails” pointed as many ways as if they had been an explosion of fireworks. the tall principal, john’s father, taught penmanship, and the little girl, with a copybook, a red-painted penholder, and a viciously sharp “gillott, 303,” took her place at one of the long, slanting tables in the hall. it was much too high for her, but no one was troubled about that in those days. if a table was[pg 8] too high, it was because the child was too short, and that was all there was to it.
day after day, ella wrote in her copybook whole pages of such thrilling statements as, “be good and you will be happy,” and, “honesty is the best policy.” of the truth of the first she was by no means convinced, for she remembered being—of necessity—very well behaved, indeed, when she was not at all happy. as to the second, she had no idea what “policy” was. she asked the principal very shyly what the sentence meant, and he said it meant that little boys and girls must always tell the truth. of course no decent children ever told lies, thought ella, with a vague indignation. she pondered over the reply, and at length made up her mind that the writing-book must have been printed for children that were ragged and dirty and said “ain’t got none.” she had to finish the page, but every line was worse written than the one before it. the principal looked a little grave and asked if she was sure that she had done her best. ella hung her head and said nothing; but maybe she had done her best—under the circumstances.
the principal tried his utmost to teach her to write the fine “spencerian” hand that was then so admired; but the wicked little “gillott, 303,” continued to stick in the paper and make sprays of ink all about—which ella rather admired as incipient pictures—and the red-painted wooden penholder still aimed at[pg 9] whatever point of the compass happened to suit the comfort of the little cramped fingers. “where should the pen point?” the principal would patiently ask; and with equal patience the pupil would reply, “over the right shoulder.” it would turn into place obediently, but long before the teacher had reached the other end of the long table, it was again pointing out the north window toward the lake or out the south window to the hill and the rocks. and why not? where the thoughts were, surely the pen might point also.
ella felt as if she was quite a busy little girl, for besides her lessons in arithmetic and penmanship, there was half an hour of french every day. it was good strong old-fashioned french, too, learned by main force from a grammar. she recited patiently, “ah, bay, say, day,” etc., as she was taught; but in her heart of hearts she thought it utter foolishness to spoil perfectly good english letters by giving them such names. she learned that there were such things as nasal sounds, objected to in english, but highly esteemed in french; and she learned to translate into the french language and pronounce—with an accent that would have thrown the politest frenchman into a state of collapse—such interesting dialogue as, “have you the girl’s glove?” “no, sir, but i have the cook’s hat”; and such bits of tragedy as, “my brother’s tailor has broken my slate,” or—most touching of all—“i liked the little girl, but she did not like me.”
[pg 10]
french, even grammar french, carried ella into a new world. she concluded that to harmonize with its caprices she ought to take a french name when, so to speak, she entered france by way of fasquelle’s grammar and the french recitation room. somewhere she had heard the word “elephantine,” and she had read, in english, about fantine and cosette. she concluded that this fine-sounding word—only she would spell it elefantine and put on plenty of accents, circumflexes, because she thought acutes and graves had an unfinished look—would accord nicely with her own name and would also be a compliment to the french, especially if it was pronounced with a good strong nasal sound in the middle of the word.
she was rather too shy to ask the french teacher to call her elefantine, but she wrote the name in her fasquelle, and had fine times saying it over to herself when she was alone. one day the mother happened to take up the book, and she showed ella in the dictionary what the word meant. all the poetry went out of it then, for ella always bowed to the authority of the big dictionary; and she promptly rubbed out the new name, accents and all.
