ctually
learned a good deal in spite of the educational influences of the
school. In fact, he had long since passed out of the possibility of
Miss Tucker's helping him. When he could not "do a sum" and referred it
to her, she always told him that it would do him much more good to get
it himself. Thus put upon his mettle, Rob was sure to come out of the
struggle somehow with the "answer" in his teeth. Miss Tucker would have
liked Rob if Rob had not loved Henrietta, who was Miss Tucker's
deadliest foe.

"Bring me that slate this instant!" repeated the schoolmistress when
Henrietta hesitated, "and don't you rub out the picture."

Henrietta's face took on a sullen look; she rose slowly, dropping the
slate with a clatter on her desk, whence it slid with a bang to the
floor, without any effort on her part to arrest it. Miss Tucker did not
observe--she was nearsighted--that in its fall, and in Henrietta's
picking it up, it was reversed, so that the side presented to the
schoolmistress was not the side on which the girl had last been at
work. All Miss Tucker saw was that the side which faced her when she
took the slate from Henrietta's hand contained a picture of a little
child. It was a chubby little face, with a funny-serious expression.
The execution was by no means correct, the foreshortening of the little
bare legs was not well done, the hands were out of drawing, and the
whole picture had the stillness that comes from inexperience. But Miss
Tucker did not see that. All she saw was that it was to her eye a
miraculously good picture.

"That's the way you get your arithmetic lesson! You haven't done a sum
this morning. You spend your time drawing little brats like that."

"She isn't a brat."

"Who isn't a brat?"

"Periwinkle isn't. That's Periwinkle."

"Who's Periwinkle?"

"She's my niece. She's Jane's little girl. You sha'n't call her a brat,
neither."

"Don't you talk to me that way, you impudent thing! That's the way you
spend your time, drawing pictures."

Miss Tucker here held the slate up in front of her and stared at the
picture of Periwinkle. Whereupon the scholars who were spectators of
Miss Tucker's indignation smiled. Some of them grew red in the face and
looked at their companions. Little Charity Jones rattled out a good,
hearty, irrepressible giggle, which she succeeded in arresting only by
stuffing her apron into her mouth.

"Charity Jones, what are you laughing at?"

But Charity only stuck her