dy
ripples every sound in the school-room swam, and also sights and colors,
till between her eye-lash and that filmy distant margin nothing existed
but a freshet, alive yet with nothing, eddying around with purposeless
power, and still moving onward with an under force. The open book in her
hand appeared like a great white wharf, or pier, covered with lime and
coal in spots and places, and pushed forward into this hissing,
rippling, exclaiming deluge, which washed its base and spread beyond.
Podge could barely read a question in the book, and the sound of her
voice was like gravel or sand pushed off the wharf into the river and
swallowed there. She thought she heard an answer in a muddy tone and
gave the question out again, and there seemed to be laughter, as if the
waters, or what was drowned in them, chuckled and purled, going along.
She raised her eyes above the laughers, and there the boundary line of
Jersey stood defined, and all in front of it was the drifting Delaware.
It seemed to her that boys were darting to and fro and swapping seats,
and one boy had thrown a handful of beans. She walked down the aisle as
if into water, wading through pools and waves of boys, who plashed and
gurgled around her. She walked back again, and a surf of boys was thrown
at her feet. The waters rose and licked and spilled and flowed onward
again. Podge felt a sense of strangling, as if going down, in a hollow
gulf of resounding wave, and shouted:

"Help! Save me! Save me!"

She heard a voice like the principal teacher's, say in a lapping, watery
way, "Miss Byerly, what is the meaning of this? Your division is in
disorder. Nobody has recited. Unless you are ill I must suspend you and
call another teacher here."

"Help! I'm floating off upon the river. Save me! I drown! I drown!"

The scholars were all up and excited. The principal motioned another
lady teacher to come, and laid Podge's head in the other's lap.

"Is it brain fever?" he asked.

"She has been under great excitement," Podge heard the other lady say.
"The Zane murder occurred in her family. Last night, I have been told,
Miss Byerly refused Mr. Bunn, our principal school director, and a man
of large means, who had long been in love with her."

"Where is he?" said the principal.

"I heard it from his sister," said the other lady. "Mortified at her
refusal, because confident that she would accept him, he sailed this day
for Europe."

These were the last words Podge