oss of the head, as the mischievous girl passed into the
school-house.

"That settles you, Will," said Pewee Rose. And Bob Holliday began
singing, to a doleful tune:

"Poor old Pidy,
She died last Friday."

Just then, the stern face of Mr. Ball, the master, appeared at the door;
he rapped sharply with his ferule, and called: "Books, books, books!"
The bats were dropped, and the boys and girls began streaming into the
school, but some of the boys managed to nudge Riley, saying:

"Poor old creetur,
The turkey-buzzards eat her,"

and such like soft and sweet speeches. Riley was vexed and angry, but
nobody was afraid of him, for a boy may be both big and mean and yet
lack courage.

The new boy did not go in at once, but stood silently and faced the
inquiring looks of the procession of boys as they filed into the
school-room with their faces flushed from the exercise and excitement of
the games.

"I can thrash him easy," thought Pewee Rose.

"He isn't a fellow to back down easily," said Harvey Collins to his next
neighbor.

Only good-natured, rough Bob Holliday stopped and spoke to the new-comer
a friendly word. All that he said was "Hello!" But how much a boy can
put into that word "Hello!" Bob put his whole heart into it, and there
was no boy in the school that had a bigger heart, a bigger hand, or half
so big a foot as Bob Holliday.

The village school-house was a long one built of red brick. It had taken
the place of the old log institution in which one generation of
Greenbank children had learned reading, writing, and Webster's
spelling-book. There were long, continuous writing-tables down the sides
of the room, with backless benches, so arranged that when the pupil was
writing his face was turned toward the wall--there was a door at each
end, and a box stove stood in the middle of the room, surrounded by a
rectangle of four backless benches. These benches were for the little
fellows who did not write, and for others when the cold should drive
them nearer the stove.

The very worshipful master sat at the east end of the room, at one side
of the door; there was a blackboard--a "newfangled notion" in 1850--at
the other side of the door. Some of the older scholars, who could afford
private desks with lids to them, suitable for concealing smuggled apples
and maple-sugar, had places at the other end of the room from the
master. This arrangement was convenient for quiet study, for talking on
the finge