In the case of Ab Maddock, big, impudent, and pachydermous, it took Dugald Robertson, the minister's son, just half an hour's hard fighting to extract a promise of good behaviour. Dugald was in the main a thoughtful, peaceable boy, the most advanced pupil in the entrance class, and a great mathematician. At first he was inclined to despise the teacher, setting little store by her beautiful face and fascinating smile, for on the very first day he discovered her woful mathematical inadequacy. Arithmetic was her despair. With algebraic formulae and Euclid's propositions her fine memory saved her. But with quick intuition she threw herself frankly upon the boy's generosity, and in the evenings together they, with Margaret's assistance, wrestled with the bewildering intricacies of arithmetical problems. Her open confession of helplessness, and her heroic attempts to overcome her defects, made irresistible appeal to the chivalrous heart of the little Highland gentleman. Thenceforth he was her champion for all that was in him.
But the teacher's weakness in mathematics was atoned for, if atonement there be for such a weakness, by the ample strength of her endowments in those branches of learning in which imagination and artistic sensibility play any large part. And a far larger part, and far more important, do these Divine gifts play than many wise educationists conceive. The lessons in history, in geography, and in reading ceased to be mere memory tasks and became instinct with life. The whole school would stay its ordinary work to listen while the teacher told tales of the brave days of old to the history class, or transformed the geography lessons into excursions among people of strange tongues dwelling in far lands. But it was in the reading lessons that her artistic talents had full play.
The mere pronouncing and spelling of words were but incidents in the way of expression of thought and emotion. After a whole week of drilling which she would give to a single lesson, she would arrest the class with the question, "What is the author seeing?" and with the further question, "How does he try to show it to us?"
Reading, to her, consisted in the ability to see what the author saw and the art of telling it, and to set forth with grace that thing in the author's words.
In the writing class her chief anxiety was to avoid blots. Every blot might become an occasion of humiliation to teacher and pupils alike. "Oh, this will never do! They must not see this!" she would cry, rubbing out with infinite care and pains the blot, and rubbing in the horror of such a defilement being paraded before the eyes of the vague but terrible "they."
Thus the pathway trodden in the school routine was, perchance, neither wide nor far extended, but it was thoroughly well trodden.
As a consequence, when the day for the closing exercises came around both teacher and pupils had become so thoroughly familiar with the path and so accustomed to the vision of the onlooking public that they faced the ordeal without dread, prepared to give forth whatever of knowledge or accomplishment they might possess.
A fortunate rainy day, making the hauling of hay or the cutting of fall wheat equally impossible, filled the school with the parents and friends of the children. The minister and the trustees were dutifully present. Of the mill people Dick and his mother appeared, Dick because his mother insisted that a student should show interest in the school, his mother because Dick refused to go a step without her. Barney came later, not because of his interest in the school, but chiefly, he declared to himself, conscious of the need of a reason, because there was nothing much else to do.
The presence of "Maine" Jabe might be taken as the high water mark of the interest aroused throughout the section in the new teacher and her methods.
The closing exercises were, with a single exception, a brilliantly flawless exhibition. That exception appeared in the Euclid of the entrance class. The mathematics were introduced early in the day.
The arithmetic, which dealt chiefly with problems of barter and sale of the various products of the farm, was lightly and deftly passed over. The algebra class was equally successful. In the Euclid class it seemed as if the hitherto unbroken success would come to an unhappy end in the bewilderment and confusion of Phoebe Ross, from whom the minister had asked a demonstration of the pons asinorum. But the blame for poor Phoebe's bewilderment clearly lay with the minister himself, for in placing the figure upon the board with the letters designating the isosceles triangle he made the fatal blunder of setting the letter B at the right hand side of the base instead of at its proper place at the left, as in the book.
