ny of our schemes,
she simply says she doesn't want to do it. That was what she said when
the rest of us proposed to masquerade as a gang of wardheelers on
election day.

You know what wardheelers are, I suppose. They are politicians who hang
around the polls and watch the voting and see that people vote for the
right party, or the wrong party, for the matter of that. It all depends
on which side they belong. When they notice anybody going to vote for the
other side, they sort of intimidate him, tell him to get away, or else
push him out of line or punch him in the head or something like that.
Sometimes they stuff the ballot-boxes, too, or go from one poll to
another, voting over and over.

Now Robbie Belle had joined in with all the other fun that autumn. There
were imitation rallies and parades and receptions to candidates and mock
banquets with real speeches and fudges and crackers to eat. She made a
perfectly splendid presidential candidate at one of the meetings. She
looked ever so much like him too as she sat gravely on the platform with
her hair parted on one side, and a borrowed silk hat clasped to the bosom
of her brother's dress suit. When all at once her face crinkled in a
sudden irresistible smile, even the seniors said she was dear. But this
time she said she'd rather not be a wardheeler. She wouldn't come to a
banquet of the gang the night before election day either. She said she
guessed she didn't want to.

Berta and Lila and I collected butter and sugar and milk at the dinner
table that evening. In our dormitory we are allowed to carry away bread
and milk to our rooms, but we are not supposed to take sugar or butter
for fudges. That seemed awfully stingy to us then; for in the pantry
there were barrels of sugar, great cans of milk, hundreds and thousands
of little yellow butterballs piled on big platters. We thought it
wouldn't do any harm to use a tiny bit of it all for our banquet.

At dinner I slid two butterballs into my glass of milk, and Lila filled
her glass with sugar from the bowl and then poured enough milk over it to
hide the grainy look. Robbie Belle kept her eyes in another direction,
but Berta said we had a right to one of the balls anyhow, because she had
not eaten butter all day. Berta is the brightest girl in the class and
she can argue about everything, and let the other person choose her side
of the question first too. It was not until later that she reformed from
that tendency to