and the faults of Henry
Weathervane and his sister were always overlooked after their father
became a school trustee.

Many efforts had been made to put a new master into the school. But Mr.
Ball's brother-in-law was one of the principal merchants in the place,
and the old man had had the school so long that it seemed like robbery
to deprive him of it. It had come, in some sort, to belong to him.
People hated to see him moved. He would die some day, they said, and
nobody could deny that, though it often seemed to the boys and girls
that he would never die; he was more likely to dry up and blow away. And
it was a long time to wait for that.

And yet I think Greenbank might have had to wait for something like that
if there hadn't come a great flight of pigeons just at this time. For
whenever Susan Lanham suggested to her father that he should try to get
Mr. Ball removed and a new teacher appointed, Dr. Lanham smiled and
said "he hated to move against the old man; he's been there so long,
you know, and he probably wouldn't live long, anyhow. Something ought to
be done, perhaps, but he couldn't meddle with him." For older people
forgot the beatings they had endured, and remembered the old man only as
one of the venerable landmarks of their childhood.

And so, by favor of Henry Weathervane's father, whose children he did
not punish, and by favor of other people's neglect and forgetfulness,
the Greenbank children might have had to face and fear the old ogre down
to this day, or until he dried up and blew away, if it hadn't been, as I
said, that there came a great flight of pigeons.

A flight of pigeons is not uncommon in the Ohio River country. Audubon,
the great naturalist, saw them in his day, and in old colonial times
such flights took place in the settlements on the sea-board, and
sometimes the starving colonists were able to knock down pigeons with
sticks. The mathematician is not yet born who can count the number of
pigeons in one of these sky-darkening flocks, which are often many miles
in length, and which follow one another for a whole day. The birds, for
the most part, fly at a considerable height from the earth, but when
they are crossing a wide valley, like that of the Ohio River, they drop
down to a lower level, and so reach the hills quite close to the ground,
and within easy gunshot.

When the pigeon flight comes on Saturday, it is very convenient for
those boys that have guns. If these pigeons had only co