aside a Greek lexicon and taking up Stella’s letter. Stella Maynard had been one
of their chums at Queen’s Academy and had been teaching school ever since.
“But I’m going to give it up, Anne dear,” she wrote, “and go to college next
year. As I took the third year at Queen’s I can enter the Sophomore year. I’m
tired of teaching in a back country school. Some day I’m going to write a treatise
on ‘The Trials of a Country Schoolmarm.’ It will be a harrowing bit of realism.
It seems to be the prevailing impression that we live in clover, and have nothing
to do but draw our quarter’s salary. My treatise shall tell the truth about us. Why,
if a week should pass without some one telling me that I am doing easy work for
big pay I would conclude that I might as well order my ascension robe
‘immediately and to onct.’ ‘Well, you get your money easy,’ some rate-payer
will tell me, condescendingly. ‘All you have to do is to sit there and hear
lessons.’ I used to argue the matter at first, but I’m wiser now. Facts are stubborn
things, but as some one has wisely said, not half so stubborn as fallacies. So I
only smile loftily now in eloquent silence. Why, I have nine grades in my school
and I have to teach a little of everything, from investigating the interiors of
earthworms to the study of the solar system. My youngest pupil is four—his
mother sends him to school to ‘get him out of the way’—and my oldest twenty
—it ‘suddenly struck him’ that it would be easier to go to school and get an
education than follow the plough any longer. In the wild effort to cram all sorts
of research into six hours a day I don’t wonder if the children feel like the little
boy who was taken to see the biograph. ‘I have to look for what’s coming next
before I know what went last,’ he complained. I feel like that myself.
“And the letters I get, Anne! Tommy’s mother writes me that Tommy is not
coming on in arithmetic as fast as she would like. He is only in simple reduction
yet, and Johnny Johnson is in fractions, and Johnny isn’t half as smart as her
Tommy, and she can’t understand it. And Susy’s father wants to know why Susy
can’t write a letter without misspelling half the words, and Dick’s aunt wants me
to change his seat, because that bad Brown boy he is sitting with is teaching him
to say naughty words.
“As to the financial part—but I’ll not begin on that. Those whom the gods
wish to destroy they first make country schoolmarms!
“There, I feel better, after that growl. After all, I’ve enjoyed these past two
years. But I’m coming to Redmond.
“And now, Anne, I’ve a little plan. You know how I loathe boarding. I’ve
boarded for four years and I’m so tired of it. I don’t feel like enduring three
years more of it.