interrupted his work, and brought him scowling
to his feet.

The little girl was standing with one arm extended and one small
forefinger pointing past him at the globe, which, for want of a better,
was but a fat pumpkin ingeniously impaled on a stick, and peeled over
part of its surface in such a manner that the five oceans were
represented, while the portion yet unpeeled showed the rude outlines of
the six continents.

"We've got lots of pumpkins bigger 'n that at our house," she was
saying, her face turned toward "Frenchy," an up-river trapper who
studied geography and English spelling between his rounds of the
sloughs. "Why, the cellar's _full_ of 'em."

The teacher rapped briskly on the table with his pencil, to call her to
order. "Look here," he said, a little crossly, "you mustn't talk out
like that. Sit down."

"No seat," she faltered, lowering her voice.

He looked up and down the girls' row; there were only four seats in it,
and they were full. The boys' benches were not; but, loath to lessen
the terrors of a favorite punishment, he hesitated to put her there.
"Come up to the rostrum, then," he said.

The little girl walked slowly forward, and a flush stole up her throat
and mounted to her temples. But when she was once seated, her sailor-hat
on one side and her Second Reader on the other, she felt less demeaned;
for the rostrum commanded a view of the whole room, and from it she
could see Luffree, fast asleep under the youngest brother's bench.

The teacher went back to the roll-call, and the pupils droned the time
away till recess. Then the boys rummaged through their willow baskets
for something to eat and went out to play "prisoner's base." But the
girls--the neighbor woman's daughter, and the seven belonging to the
Dutchman who lived at the Vermillion's forks--stayed in, gathered in a
silent circle about the rostrum, fingered the big gold brooch that the
little girl's mother had let her wear as a reward for attending, and
looked her up and down, from the scarlet bow on her hair to her fringed
leggings. And she, never having seen the Dutchman's children before,
forgot to be polite, and stared back at their denim dresses, pigtails,
and wooden shoes.

When school took up again, the Swede boy was told to put his sums on a
bit of tar-papered wall near him, and a mixed class in reading lined up
in front of the teacher's table. Soon, however, the room was again
quiet. The Swede boy and the class sat dow