the class to be promoted met as usual in the second room, and with their books marched into the first room. besides the glory of the promotion, ella’s dignity had another foundation, namely, that she was thoroughly up to date in her equipment. her smoothly sliding slate pencil that worked like a gold one had not yet been surpassed by any new invention, but the large slate was quite behind the times. the proper thing now was to have what was apparently a book about the size of her arithmetic and grammar, but made up of four small slates, of real slate, but thin and light, and with slender wooden frames. the binding of ella’s was of a bright, cheery shade of blue, and on the outside was printed in gilt, with a large spencerian flourish, “notes.”
the slate was enough to give elegance to her outfit, but the crowning touch of distinction was her book-carrier. bags had long before gone out of use, if indeed they had ever been in use in that city. the informal court of school girls had decided some time before this that a strap buckled around a little pile of books would do very well for boys, but was not in the best taste for their sisters. moreover, the strap jammed the edges of the books, and this was an argument[pg 132] against it which was not without force at home, for even in families of little education a schoolbook was an article to be tenderly cared for.
books were not provided by the city and showered into the hands of pupils to be used or abused according to disposition and home training, or lack of training, and then tossed to the following class. they were to be bought, sometimes with self-denial on the part of children or their parents, to be neatly covered with light brown paper or sometimes with some well-wearing color of calico, and treated with respect. a new book was an acquisition, an article of value to have and to hold. usually the child’s name and the date of its purchase were written on the flyleaf, often, by special request, in the handwriting of the teacher. books were used for a long time. with all the glory of promotion to the first room, only two new books were to be bought. the same geography, grammar, speller, and arithmetic were to serve for the two years before going to the high school.
to carry these precious volumes a new article had recently been invented. the books were laid between two parallel pieces of wood with a strong cord running through holes at either end and wound up by a little wheel and ratchet under the handle. the slight snap that the wheel made in catching was exceedingly agreeable to the ears of little schoolgirl owners.
these carriers were not yet very common; but ella had with considerable foresight and crocheting of[pg 133] mittens prepared for the future; and now when all the boys and most of the girls marched into the first room with jagged armfuls of books and slates, ella, and two or three others carried only neatly screwed up carriers carefully packed with the largest books at the bottom and the smallest at the top, especially when the smallest was a new notebook slate.
the principal sat on the platform, and as ella went by, she gave him a friendly little smile which he found himself returning. the assistant was assigning seats. these were given out according to the rank of the pupil for the last quarter. ella had been number one, and so the place of honor, the seat in the farthest corner from the front, was given to her. alma sat beside her. back of her was a wall, and on her right side was another wall.
alma was a quiet girl who studied hard, and ella liked her; but alma never whispered, not even if she had plenty of extras to spare, and, ella feared, would not even “communicate.” the assistant had explained what was meant by “communicating.” if you smiled at anyone or nodded your head, or took up your deskmate’s pencil with a look that meant, “may i use this?” you were communicating. in short, you were expected to behave “as if you were entirely alone in the room,” said the assistant.
ella had meant to be very, very good in this new room, but expectations of such preternatural excellence alarmed her. she felt like a naughty little imp[pg 134] dropped by mistake into a roomful of particularly well-behaved angels. just then she looked up and caught sight of a vacant chair standing near the assistant’s place on the platform. that was where she had sat to do the examples that had admitted her to the second room. it was five months ago. none of the first roomers had paid any attention to her. she was quite beneath them. and now she herself was a first roomer. she was no longer a naughty little imp, she was one of the particularly well-behaved angels. she was twelve years old, and in two years she would go to the high school. she sat up very straight and arranged her books in her half of the desk with much dignity.
ella had supposed that the lessons would be harder in the first room, and she was surprised to find that they were no more difficult than in the second room, though perhaps a little more accuracy was required—if that was possible.
the spelling lessons were always written. “people rarely spell words orally,” declared the principal. “nine tenths of the time they write them. what is needed is the ability to spell correctly on paper, and to spell without the slightest hesitation.”
the first step in this undertaking was to cut foolscap paper into strips between two and three inches wide. this was done by the principal in primitive fashion, that is, with a jackknife and ruler. they were sold to the pupils at eight strips for a cent. when[pg 135] spelling was called, each child wrote her name at the top of a strip, dipped her pen into the ink, and squared for instant action. the assistant took her stand beside one of the swiftest writers of the class and gave out words selected from the lesson of the day, as rapidly as they could be written. every word must be correct at the first writing. in the first place, there was no time to make any change. in the second place, the attempt was always discovered. even a shower of little blots, carefully made to resemble the work of a spluttering pen, and incidentally to conceal a mistake, availed nothing. the papers were corrected by the pupils, and never was one allowed to pass with even an undotted i or an uncrossed t.
straight through the spelling book the children went, reviewing over and over again what they had learned in the lower rooms, and adding to their knowledge by “advance lessons.” they learned columns of words in which ire, yre, ier, iar, igher, and uyer have the same sound; others in which c, d, and ch are silent; they learned words that hunt in couples, pronounced alike but spelled differently and ridiculously apart in meaning; and finally they learned some 1500 of those words of the english language that may be counted upon almost with certainty to produce a crop of failures.
fifty words were written each day, and to win the longed for 100 per cent, every one of them must be above suspicion. there were examinations in spelling[pg 136] of course, and as a kind of supertest, the class was one day required to write from dictation on the spur of the moment, the following sentence:
it is an agreeable sight to witness the unparalleled embarrassment of the harassed peddler, attempting to gauge the symmetry of an onion which a sibyl had peeled with a poniard, regardless of the innuendoes of the lilies of carnelian hue.
pupils who ranked high were given in turn the charge of the report book. this was an honor, but also a great responsibility. there were no mistakes in that book, for every figure was watched. “i am keeping my own report very rigidly myself this term,” wrote ella, “so as to see if there is any foul play.”
keeping the reports was not only a responsible but a complicated matter. to begin with, there were “whole failures” and “half failures.” a downright “i don’t know” was a whole failure. a slightly muddled recitation, not all wrong and not all right, was a half failure. then, too, there were extras to be considered and taken account of. sometimes these were promised in advance, but generally they were given unexpectedly for some specially good piece of work. a particularly good map, an unusually clear recitation of some difficult point, sometimes won from one to ten extras. on one never-to-be-forgotten day, when there was a very hard lesson in grammar, the assistant gave to every one who did not fail ten good solid extras, thus deeply arousing the regret of those who[pg 137] would have studied harder if they had guessed what she meant to do.
grammar was in the hands of the assistant, and it was whispered among awestruck children that the author of the grammar—author of a printed book!—had said that he wished he could teach his own book as well as she. could there be greater glory? in the lower rooms, a smaller grammar was used; but on entering the second room this larger textbook came to its own, and was used every day for two years and a half. it never occurred to any one that the children might cease to be interested and that it would be better to make a change every little while. the grammar was there to be learned, and learned thoroughly.
when they came to the list of prepositions, ella was appalled. she had never had the training of the lower grades in learning unrelated words, and to learn this list of sixty-four was much worse than lists of productions. she asked the assistant:
“why do we have to learn that list?”
“so that you will recognize a preposition when you come to it.”
“but i always do.”
“how do you know one?”
“just the same way i know a kitten. if it behaves like a kitten, it is a kitten. if it behaves like a preposition, it is a preposition.”
the assistant laughed. “it is true that you always[pg 138] do know a preposition,” she said thoughtfully. “the others learned that list in the lower rooms, and without it i am afraid some of them would not know a preposition from a kitten. we’ll talk this over some day.”
ella wisely concluded that she need not learn the list, but that she must not tell any one of her privilege. her experience at the seminary as a “faculty child” had taught her never to reveal faculty secrets, and this one was never told. the assistant did not mention the matter again, but ella noticed that one day when the embarrassing question would naturally have fallen to her, it was given to some one else.
one evening at the close of the first term in the first room, ella did some counting and measuring of paragraphs. then she said:
“mother, we have been over only twenty-two pages this whole term. of course there are exercises besides, but what we have really learned, if it was printed together solidly, would make only seven.”
“i will speak to the assistant if you like,” said the mother, “and ask her if she can arrange to give you longer lessons.”
“oh, no,” cried ella in some alarm. “if the lessons were longer, there wouldn’t be any time to read and play and crochet and draw and go to see the other girls and have them come to see me. but i was just thinking how it would sound if i should get to be a famous woman some day and any one asked how[pg 139] much grammar i used to do in a term, and you would have to say, ‘seven pages.’ then people would think i must have been horribly stupid.”
“don’t worry,” advised the mother with a smile. “before you are a famous woman, there will be time enough to go over more pages. just learn everything thoroughly. that’s all you have to do now.”
“i do learn everything thoroughly,” declared ella. “i have to, if i am going to stay at the head of the class—and i am,” she added with emphasis. “anyway, i like grammar. i don’t like learning rules, of course, and when i give an illustration that is just as good as the one in the book and a great deal more sensible, i don’t see why it should be called wrong. i recited, ‘the adverbial element may be an adverbial clause denoting time.’ the illustration was ‘while i was musing, the fire burned.’ now when you’re musing, the fire doesn’t burn, it goes out, or at any rate it burns low; so i said, ‘while i was musing, the fire burned low.’ the sentence contained an adverbial clause, and it was good sense and the way fires behave, and it sounded better; but it was counted half a failure. i don’t think that was fair; but i do like parsing and analyzing. it’s real fun to shake a sentence all to pieces till it has to tell you just what it means and what it didn’t intend you should ever know. it’s as much fun as any game. but when an illustration illustrates, it does illustrate. it’s right, and i don’t see how it could be any more right.”
[pg 140]
“perhaps when you become that famous woman, you can write a grammar that will keep every little girl at the head of the class and never allow any one to fail.”
“but i don’t believe i’d care so much about being at the head if every one else was there. do you think it’s selfish to want to be at the head?”
“how should you feel if some other girl was always at the head? that’s the way to find out,” said the mother.
“i suppose i shouldn’t like it,” ella replied thoughtfully. “but i like the principal, and i have reason to think that he likes me, and he would be disappointed if i failed on purpose and went down. it would not be right to disappoint him, would it?”
“no,” said the mother, “it would be wrong not to do your best; but you must try just as hard to be kind to all the boys and girls as you do to stand at the head.”
“there’s one boy who doesn’t like me,” said ella meditatively, “and i never did a thing to him. he told the assistant to-day that i was drawing a picture. she told me to bring it to the desk. i was trying to copy the ‘landing of the pilgrims’ from our history. she looked at it, and then she said, ‘ella has taken great pains with it, and it is very well done. learn your lessons as well as she does, and you may draw, too. and remember that i do not like tale-bearing.’”
[pg 141]
“i hope you didn’t smile and look pleased when she said that.”
“no, i didn’t—neither did the boy. i did make up a face, though,” she added a moment later.
“why, ella!”
“oh, just in my mind, i mean. it didn’t do him any harm, and it made me feel a whole lot better.”
