etween the two, for Amos was a blockhead with a reading
book, and the boy put him terribly to shame before all the school.

He could talk, but he could not read.

"Dodd" had come to school with a sixth reader. It was a world too wide
for his small attainments, with its quotations from Greek and Latin
orators, Webster, Clay, Hastings, et al., but it was the only reader of
the series used in Amos's school that grandma Stebbins could find in
the carefully saved pile of old school books that were housed in the
garret, the residuum of former school generations. So, with a sixth
reader, the boy went to school.

This is the common way of supplying children with school books in the
rural districts. He brought, also, an arithmetic and a speller, but as
his knowledge of the first branch only reached to that part of it which
lies on the hither side of the multiplication table, and as "Webster"
is the chief speller used by children in country schools, and he could
not go estray in that point, these facts need not be emphasized.

As he brought a sixth reader, to the sixth reader class he went. This
also is common in schools of this class. It is not supposed to be by
those who talk learnedly before the legislature about "grading the
country schools," and all that, but it is the way things are done in
the country, as any one will find who will take the pains to go into
the country and find out. It is understood by the patrons that it is
the teacher's business to put the pupil to work with the books that he
brings with him, and in putting "Dodd" into the sixth reader Amos only
did as the rest do in this regard, that is all.

This class was made up of four pupils, two boys and two girls, tall,
awkward creatures, who went to the front of the room twice a day and
read in a sing-song tone out of two books which were the joint
possession of the quartette. The girls used always to stand in class
with their arms around each other and their heads leaned together, as
they swayed back and forth and rattled over the words of the page; and
the boys leaned back against the wall, usually standing on one leg and
sticking the other foot up on the wall behind them.

"Dodd" was a pigmy beside these, but he read better than any of them,
and soon convinced Amos that he, "Dodd," must be taken down a peg, or
he, Amos, would find himself looked down upon by his pupils, who would
see him worsted by this stripling.

He strove to nettle the boy in