e back with several of the other boys and
drank in the long and tedious wrangle between the partisans in the
school matter.

"And, by jinks!" the boy proclaimed, "lemme tell you, Janice, it looked
like the vote was goin' ag'in us till Mr. Haley began to talk. I thought
he didn't have much interest in the thing. Nobody thought he did. I
heard some of the old fellers cacklin' that 'teacher didn't favor the
idee none.'

"But, say! When he got up to talk, he showed 'em. He was sitting
alongside of Elder Concannon himself, and the Elder had made a mighty
strong speech against increasin' taxes and burdenin' the town for years
and years with a school debt.

"But, talk about argument! Mr. Haley sailed inter them old fossils, and
made the fur fly, you bet!"

"Oh, Marty! Fur fly from fossils?" chuckled Janice.

"That _does_ sound like a teaser, don't it?" responded her cousin, with
a grin. "Just the same, Mr. Haley made 'em all sit up and take notice.
He didn't only speak for the schoolhouse, and new methods of teaching,
and a graded school; but he took up Elder Concannon's arguments and shot
'em full of holes.

"You ought to have seen the old gentleman's face when Mr. Haley proved
that a better-taught generation of scholars would possess an increased
earning power and so be better able to take up and pay the school bonds
than the present taxpayers.

"Say! the folks cheered! When Mr. Haley sat down, the question was put
and the vote went through with a rush. But Elder Concannon and Old Bill
Jones, and Mr. Cross Moore, and some of the others, were as mad as they
could be."

"Mad at Mr. Haley?" queried Janice, with sudden anxiety.

"You bet! But they can't take the school away from him till the end of
the year, as long as he doesn't neglect his work. So Dad says, and he
knows."

Janice was worried. She knew that Nelson Haley had hoped to teach the
Poketown school at least two years, so as to get what he called "a
stake" for law-school studies. And there were not many ungraded schools
in the state that paid as well as Poketown's; for it was a large school.

The furor occasioned by the special town meeting, and the fight for the
new school, passed over. A site for the school was secured just off of
High Street near the center of the town--a much handier situation for
all concerned. The ground would be broken for the cellar as soon as the
frost had gone.

The committee appointed at the town meeting to have charge of th