Elizabeth Ann looked up from this letter and across the table at Aunt Abigail’s rosy, wrinkled old face, bent over her darning. Uncle Henry laid the paper down, took a big mouthful of popcorn, and beat time silently with his hand. When he could speak he murmured: An hundred dogs bayed deep and strong, Clattered an hundred steeds along.
Old Shep woke up with a snort and Aunt Abigail fed him a handful of popcorn. Little Eleanor stirred in her sleep, stretched, yawned, and nestled down into a ball again on the little girl’s lap. Betsy could feel in her own body the rhythmic vibration of the kitten’s contented purr.
Aunt Abigail looked up: “Finished your letter? I hope Harriet is no worse. What does Frances say?”
Elizabeth Ann blushed a deep red and crushed the letter together in her hand. She felt ashamed and she did not know why. “Aunt Frances says, … Aunt Frances says, …” she began, hesitating. “She says Aunt Harriet is still pretty sick.” She stopped, drew a long breath, and went on, “And she sends her love to you.”
Now Aunt Frances hadn’t done anything of the kind, so this was a really whopping fib. But Elizabeth Ann didn’t care if it was. It made her feel less ashamed, though she did not know why. She took another mouthful of popcorn and stroked Eleanor’s back. Uncle Henry got up and stretched. “It’s time to go to bed, folks,” he said. As he wound the clock Betsy heard him murmuring:
But when the sun his beacon red. …
VII
Elizabeth Ann Fails in an Examination
I wonder if you can guess the name of a little girl who, about a month after this, was walking along through the melting snow in the woods with a big black dog running circles around her. Yes, all alone in the woods with a terrible great dog beside her, and yet not a bit afraid. You don’t suppose it could be Elizabeth Ann? Well, whoever she was, she had something on her mind, for she walked more and more slowly and had only a very absentminded pat for the dog’s head when he thrust it up for a caress. When the wood road led into a clearing in which there was a rough little house of slabs, the child stopped altogether, and, looking down, began nervously to draw lines in the snow with her overshoe.
You see, something perfectly dreadful had happened in school that day. The Superintendent, the all-important, seldom-seen Superintendent, came to visit the school and the children were given some examinations so he could see how they were getting on.
Now, you know what an examination did to Elizabeth Ann. Or haven’t I told you yet?
Well, if I haven’t, it’s because words fail me. If there is anything horrid that an examination didn’t do to Elizabeth Ann, I have yet to hear of it. It began years ago, before ever she went to school, when she heard Aunt Frances talking about how she had dreaded examinations when she was a child, and how they dried up her mouth and made her ears ring and her head ache and her knees get all weak and her mind a perfect blank, so that she didn’t know what two and two made. Of course Elizabeth Ann didn’t feel all those things right off at her first examination, but by the time she had had several and had rushed to tell Aunt Frances about how awful they were and the two of them had sympathized with one another and compared symptoms and then wept about her resulting low marks, why, she not only had all the symptoms Aunt Frances had ever had, but a good many more of her own invention.
Well, she had had them all and had them hard this afternoon, when the Superintendent was there. Her mouth had gone dry and her knees had shaken and her elbows had felt as though they had no more bones in them than so much jelly, and her eyes had smarted, and oh, what answers she had made! That dreadful tight panic had clutched at her throat whenever the Superintendent had looked at her, and she had disgraced herself ten times over. She went hot and cold to think of it, and felt quite sick with hurt vanity. She who did so well every day and was so much looked up to by her classmates, what must they be thinking of her! To tell the truth, she had been crying as she walked along through the woods, because she was so sorry for herself. Her eyes were all red still, and her throat sore from the big lump in it.
And now she would live it all over again as she told the Putney cousins. For of course they must be told. She had always told Aunt Frances everything that happened in school. It happened that Aunt Abigail had been taking a nap when she got home from school, and so she had come out to the sap-house, where Cousin Ann and Uncle Henry were making syrup, to have it over with as soon as possible. She went up to the little slab house now, dragging her feet
