ss-rooms assigned to the lady teachers and their several grades
of learners were all on the northern side of the academy building. There
was a large wing there that belonged to them, and they only met the boys
face to face in the "great room" during morning exercises. Even those of
them who lived or boarded in the southern half of the village found
their way across the green, coming and going, under the shade of the
most northerly row of trees.

As to the "great room" itself, there had been much trouble about the
name of it. Dr. Brandegee called it "the lecture-room," and he did a
great deal towards making it so. There were those who tried to say
"chapel" when they spoke of it; but so many others refused to know what
place they were speaking of, that they had to give it up. "Hall" would
not fit, because it was square; and the boys generally rejected the
doctor's name because of unpleasant-ideas connected with the word
"lecture." So it came to be "the great room," and no more; and a great
thing it was for Dick Lee to find himself sitting on one of the front
seats of it, with his friends all in line at his right, waiting their
turn with him to be "classified," and sent about their business.

Dr. Brandegee made wonderfully rapid work of it; and his several
assistants seemed to know exactly what to do.

"The fact is," said Ford, the first chance he had to speak to Dab, "I've
been studying that man. He's taught school before."

"Guess he knows how, too. And I ain't afraid about Dick Lee, now I've
seen the rest. He can go right ahead of some of them."

"They'll bounce him if he does. Tell you what, Dab, if you and I want to
be popular here, we'd better wear our old clothes every day but Sunday."

"And miss about half the questions that come to us. Dick won't be sharp
enough for that."

"He says he's going to write a letter home tonight. Made him turn pale
too."

Those first letters home!

Ford's was a matter of course, and Frank Harley had had some practice
already; but Dab Kinzer had never tried such a thing before, and Dick
Lee would not come to anybody else for instructions. Neither would he
permit anybody, not even "Captain Dab," to see his letter after it was
written.

"I's been mighty partikler 'bout de pronounciation," he said to himself,
"specially in wot I wrote to Mr. Morris, but I'd like to see dem all
read dem letters. Guess dar'll be a high time at our house."

It would be a long while before Frank H