ur soul, boy!" he exclaimed, by and by, as he put down
his instrument. "We shall have a good time together--that we will. Not a
stroke o' work this day! Come, I have a guide here that will take us
down to the land o' the fairies."

Then with his microscope he showed me into the wonder world of
littleness of which I had had no knowledge.

"The microscope is like the art o' the teacher," he said. "I've known a
good teacher to take a brain no bigger than a fly's foot an' make it
visible to the naked eye."

One of the children, of which there were four in the Hacket home, called
us to supper. Mrs. Hacket, a stout woman with a red and kindly face, sat
at one end of the table, and between them were the children--Mary, a
pretty daughter of seventeen years; Maggie, a six-year-old; Ruth, a
delicate girl of seven, and John, a noisy, red-faced boy of five. The
chairs were of plain wood--like the kitchen chairs of to-day. In the
middle of the table was an empty one--painted green. Before he sat down
Mr. Hacket put his hand on the back of this chair and said:

"A merry heart to you, Michael Henry."

I wondered at the meaning of this, but dared not to ask. The oldest
daughter acted as a kind of moderator with the others.

"Mary is the constable of this house, with power to arrest and hale into
court for undue haste or rebellion or impoliteness," Mr. Hacket
explained.

"I believe that Sally Dunkelberg is your friend," he said to me
presently.

"Yes, sir," I answered.

"A fine slip of a girl that and a born scholar. I saw you look at her as
the Persian looks at the rising sun."

I blushed and Mary and her mother and the boy John looked at me and
laughed.

"_Puer pulcherrime!_" Mr. Hacket exclaimed with a kindly smile.

Uncle Peabody would have called it a "stout snag." The schoolmaster had
hauled it out of his brain very deftly and chucked it down before me in
a kind of challenge.

"What does that mean?" I asked.

"You shall know in a week, my son," he answered. "I shall put you into
the Latin class Wednesday morning, and God help you to like it as well
as you like Sally."

Again they laughed and again I blushed.

"Hold up yer head, my brave lad," he went on. "Ye've a perfect right to
like Sally if ye've a heart to."

He sang a rollicking ballad of which I remember only the refrain:

_A lad in his teens will never know beans if he hasn't an eye for
the girls_.

It was a merry supper, and when it ende