"Thank you, sir," says Bessie, with mock humility, as she crushed her straw hat down over her bright ringlets.
"Mischief take these women," Master Grey was heard to utter, as he went through the snow by starlight to a cold supper. "Shall I conquer Zeb, to strike my colors to a girl of sixteen?"
There was plenty to talk about over the brown bread and milk, at the farmers' tea-tables that night; the youngsters all made up their minds that if there was "a time to play," it was not in Master Grey's school-room, and the old farmers said they were glad the District had a schoolmaster at last that was good for something, and that they should think better of city chaps in future for his sake. Even Zeb himself acknowledged, over his father's forge, as he mended his broken suspenders, that Master Grey was a "trump."
The nine o'clock bell summoned again the Frog-town pupils to the District School. Master Grey in vain looked in Bessie's face for any sign of submission. She had evidently made up her mind to brave him. After the usual preliminary exercises, she was called up to recite. Fixing her saucy black eyes upon him, she said, "I told you I would _not_ learn that lesson, and I have not learned it." "And I told _you_," said Master Grey, (a slight flush passing over his forehead) "that I should punish you if you did not learn it? Did I not?" Bessie's red lip quivered, but she deigned him no reply.
"You will hold out your hand, Betsey," said Mr. Grey, taking up a large ferule that lay beside him. The color left Bessie's cheek, but the little hand was extended with martyr-like determination, and amid a silence that might be felt, the ferule came down upon it, with justice as unflinching as if it were not owned by a woman. Betsey was not proof against this humiliation; she burst into tears, and the answering tear in Master Grey's eye showed how difficult and repugnant had been the task.
From that day, Master Grey was "monarch of all he surveyed," and, truth compels me to own, by none better loved or more implicitly obeyed, than by Miss Bessie.
Master Grey's "boarding week" at my uncle's had now expired. What a change had it effected in me! Life was no longer aimless: the old, glad sparkle had come back to my heavy eye; I no longer dreaded the solitude of my own thoughts. The dull rain dropping on my chamber roof had its music for my ears; the stars wore a new and a glittering brightness, and Winter, with his snowy mantle, frosty breath, and icicle diadem, seemed lovelier to me than violet-slippered Spring, with roses in her hair. I still saw Master Grey each day at school. How patiently he bore with my multiplied deficiencies, and with what a delicate and womanly appreciation of my extreme sensitiveness, he soothed my wounded pride. No pale-eyed flower fainting beneath the garish noonday heat ever so thirsted for the cool dews of twilight, as did my desolate heart for his soothing tones and kindly words.