have
found himself enjoying educational advantages for which he had no
ambition whatever.

Roused from perfect apathy, the boy cast about the schoolroom an eye
wearied to nausea by the perpetual vision of the neat teacher upon the
platform, the backs of the heads of the pupils in front of him, and the
monotonous stretches of blackboard threateningly defaced by arithmetical
formulae and other insignia of torture. Above the blackboard, the
walls of the high room were of white plaster--white with the qualified
whiteness of old snow in a soft coal town. This dismal expanse was
broken by four lithographic portraits, votive offerings of a thoughtful
publisher. The portraits were of good and great men, kind men; men
who loved children. Their faces were noble and benevolent. But the
lithographs offered the only rest for the eyes of children fatigued by
the everlasting sameness of the schoolroom. Long day after long day,
interminable week in and interminable week out, vast month on vast
month, the pupils sat with those four portraits beaming kindness down
upon them. The faces became permanent in the consciousness of the
children; they became an obsession--in and out of school the children
were never free of them. The four faces haunted the minds of children
falling asleep; they hung upon the minds of children waking at night;
they rose forebodingly in the minds of children waking in the morning;
they became monstrously alive in the minds of children lying sick of
fever. Never, while the children of that schoolroom lived, would they
be able to forget one detail of the four lithographs: the hand of
Longfellow was fixed, for them, forever, in his beard. And by a simple
and unconscious association of ideas, Penrod Schofield was accumulating
an antipathy for the gentle Longfellow and for James Russell Lowell and
for Oliver Wendell Holmes and for John Greenleaf Whittier, which would
never permit him to peruse a work of one of those great New Englanders
without a feeling of personal resentment.

His eyes fell slowly and inimically from the brow of Whittier to
the braid of reddish hair belonging to Victorine Riordan, the little
octoroon girl who sat directly in front of him. Victorine's back was as
familiar to Penrod as the necktie of Oliver Wendell Holmes. So was her
gayly coloured plaid waist. He hated the waist as he hated Victorine
herself, without knowing why. Enforced companionship in large quantities
and on an equal basis betwe