“Oh, we couldn’t do that,” said the deacon.
Tommy was silent for a time. Then he said,——
“Well, I don’t suppose we could find anybody that would want to trade a pony for him, but don’t you think you could trade him for a goat?”
Every boy and girl in America ought to go to school. The public school is one of the best institutions connected with the life of our nation. But did you ever hear of a little girl who went to school to herself? I have, and I want to tell you about it.
There was no school house, and no teachers; nothing only just little Tootsie; not even her dolls; just simply Tootsie sitting all alone on the couch near the window. That was all there was to this little school, so far as anybody could see.
But Tootsie said she had a large school, with some sixty pupils. Sometimes she would say that her scholars had been naughty and that they would have to stay in at recess; and then again she would say that they had been promoted to a higher grade; she often talked to her pupils as if they were real live people, telling them how they should stand and how they should sit and giving them permission to be excused, and so on. So you see it seemed in Tootsie’s mind very much more like a real school than it could to us.
Every morning, when Tootsie’s sister would start for school, Tootsie would watch her until she was out of sight, and then she would go and sit down on the couch. Not having a true-true school book, she would take her Christmas story books. At first she would only look at the pictures and try to think what the story about them must be. Then she would ask mama or grandma, or whoever happened to be nearest, what the words of the picture-story were. She would then say the words of the story over to herself, and look at the picture. Next day she would read over the words of the same story as far as she could remember them, and when she came to a word that she did not know, up she would jump and go and ask some one what it was. When she had learned a story herself, she would then talk to her sixty imaginary scholars about it, showing them the picture and explaining the story to them just as though the children were all there before her in her little school room.