burt had eyed her distrustfully; then she had granted the favor.
Three days later, she had regretted her concession.

The seat was so near the front corner of the room that the
schoolmistress was obliged to turn her head to see the children. She was
a bloodless, thin-necked, lackadaisical young person, in little-eyed
spectacles, who, in her youth, had been compared to a drooping lily.
From that time onward, she had given all her thought to the cultivation
of slow, graceful, lily-like motions, until it had become second nature
for her to ogle and smirk and roll her head gently this way and that. It
had not only rendered her intolerable to the unprejudiced observer, but
it had made her physically incapable of turning about quickly enough to
catch the culprits in the corner. Every disturbance in the room, and
they were not few nor slight, appeared to come from the one source; yet
by the time Miss Hulburt could focus her little spectacles upon them,
Phebe and Isabel were swaying to and fro and whispering their lessons to
themselves with an intentness which was almost religious.

It was one of the warm, bright days of late October, and the children
had insisted on opening the window behind them, not so much for the sake
of the clear, soft air as for the furtherance of their nefarious
schemes. In the lap of each child lay a tiny china doll, a long string,
and a box of what, at first sight, appeared to be parti-colored rags. A
closer inspection, however, showed that the rags were all round and
pierced with three holes, one in the middle, the others slightly to one
side.

When the first geography lesson was called, the girls propped their open
books before them, and abandoned themselves to the task in hand.
Selecting a circle of cloth from the box, each one of them proceeded to
clothe her doll by the simple process of thrusting the head and arms
through the holes and tying a string about the waist. Isabel's doll was
a negro and was decked in scarlet. Phebe's was of Caucasian extraction,
and preferred blue. The dolls were robed and the long strings were made
fast to their necks. Stealthily and slowly the girls poked them through
the crack of the open window and let them down, swinging them back and
forth until they heard them click against the window of the room below.
Then they jerked the strings sharply upward, and Isabel giggled again.
Phebe coughed to smother the sound, and then gave her friend a warning
pinch.

Miss Hul