“But didn’t you see any when you went traveling?” asked Hinpoha, still incredulous.
“Never went traveling,” returned Katherine. “It took considerable hustling to stay right where we were. One year the locusts ate up everything, down to the clothes on the line, and we couldn’t get enough feed to fatten the stock; the next year there were prairie fires that licked the earth as clean as a plate; one year the cattle all died of disease, and so on. It wasn’t until this year that we came out ahead enough to send me here to school.”
And when the girls heard what a hard time she had had they adored her more than ever because she could be so funny when she had had so little to be funny about.
Another thing that charmed her beyond measure was the color of the autumn leaves. The Winnebagos could hardly pull her past a tree. “There was only one tree in sight on our farm,” she would tell them, “and that wasn’t green like the trees are in the east; it was just a dusty, greenish gray. And the leaves didn’t turn colors in the fall; they just withered up and dropped off. Oh-h-h, look at that one over there—isn’t it just too gorgeous for words?”
When we said that both teachers and pupils regarded Katherine as too good to be true, we should have made one exception. That exception was Miss Snively, the Senior Oratory teacher. Most of the teachers were liked by some scholars and disliked by some, according to disposition or circumstance; but all pupils agreed heartily that they did not like Miss Snively. She was neither old nor bad looking; in fact, she was rather handsome when you saw her for the first time, but she was so bitingly sarcastic that her classes stood in fear and trembling of being singled out for some poisoned shaft. Sarcasm and ridicule are the most deadly weapons to use against boys and girls of the high school age. They are not old enough to know how to come back, and can only nurse the smart and writhe impotently. And of all classes to have a sarcastic teacher, Senior Oratory is the worst. It is bad enough to stand up and make a speech with appropriate gestures before a sympathetic teacher who corrects diplomatically and never, never laughs, but to have one who eyes you coldly all the while and then gets up and does it the way you did, only ten times worse—more buckets of tears had been shed over Senior Oratory than all other subjects put together.