ne officially seemed to be as intimately associated with
Dora Yocum and superiority as the others were. Ramsey couldn't hate
Abraham Lincoln, even when Dora was chosen to deliver the "Gettysburg
Address" on the twelfth of February. Vaguely, yet reassuringly, Ramsey
felt that Lincoln had resisted adoption by the intellectuals. Lincoln
had said "Government of the people, by the people, for the people," and
that didn't mean government by the teacher and the Teacher's Pet
and Paul Revere and Shakespeare and suchlike; it meant government by
everybody, and therefore Ramsey had as much to do with it as anybody
else had. This was friendly; and he believed that if Abraham Lincoln
could have walked into the schoolroom, Lincoln would have been as
friendly with him as with Dora and the teacher herself. Beyond a doubt,
Dora and the teacher _thought_ Lincoln belonged to them and their crowd
of exclusives; they seemed to think they owned the whole United States;
but Ramsey was sure they were mistaken about Abraham Lincoln.

He felt that it was just like this little Yocum snippet to assume such a
thing, and it made him sicker than ever to look at her.

Then, one day, he noticed that her eye-winkers were stickin' out farther
and farther.

Chapter IV

His discovery irritated him the more. Next thing, this ole Teacher's Pet
would do she'd get to thinkin' she was pretty! If _that_ happened, well,
nobody _could_ stand her! The long lashes made her eyes shadowy, and it
was a fact that her shoulder blades ceased to insist upon notoriety; you
couldn't tell where they were at all, any more. Her back seemed to be
just a regular back, not made up of a lot of implements like shoulder
blades and things.

A contemptible thing happened. Wesley Bender was well known to be the
most untidy boy in the class and had never shown any remorse for his
reputation or made the slightest effort either to improve or to dispute
it. He was content: it failed to lower his standing with his fellows
or to impress them unfavourably. In fact, he was treated as one who has
attained a slight distinction. At least, he owned one superlative, no
matter what its quality, and it lifted him out of the commonplace. It
helped him to become better known, and boys liked to be seen with him.
But one day, there was a rearrangement of the seating in the schoolroom:
Wesley Bender was given a desk next in front of Dora Yocum's; and within
a week the whole room knew that Wesl