When the old woman had spoken thus to Hannah and had latched the door, she muttered, “That gal don’t never show no gratitude fer favors;” to which Bud rejoined that he didn’t think she had no great sight to be pertickler thankful fer. To which Mrs. Means made no reply, thinking it best, perhaps, not to wake up her dutiful son on so interesting a theme as her treatment of Hannah. Ralph felt glad that he was this evening to go to another boarding place. He should not hear the rest of the controversy.
Ralph walked to the schoolhouse with Bill. They were friends again. For when Hank Banta’s ducking and his dogged obstinacy in sitting in his wet clothes had brought on a serious fever, Ralph had called together the big boys, and had said: “We must take care of one another, boys. Who will volunteer to take turns sitting up with Henry?” He put his own name down, and all the rest followed.
“William Means and myself will sit up tonight,” said Ralph. And poor Bill had been from that moment the teacher’s friend. He was chosen to be Ralph’s companion. He was Puppy Means no longer! Hank could not be conquered by kindness, and the teacher was made to feel the bitterness of his resentment long after. But Bill Means was for the time entirely placated, and he and Ralph went to spelling-school together.
Every family furnished a candle. There were yellow dips and white dips, burning, smoking, and flaring. There was laughing, and talking, and giggling, and simpering, and ogling, and flirting, and courting. What a full-dress party is to Fifth Avenue, a spelling-school is to Hoopole County. It is an occasion which is metaphorically inscribed with this legend: “Choose your partners.” Spelling is only a blind in Hoopole County, as is dancing on Fifth Avenue. But as there are some in society who love dancing for its own sake, so in Flat Creek district there were those who loved spelling for its own sake, and who, smelling the battle from afar, had come to try their skill in this tournament, hoping to freshen the laurels they had won in their schooldays.
“I ’low,” said Mr. Means, speaking as the principal school trustee, “I ’low our friend the Square is jest the man to boss this ’ere consarn tonight. Ef nobody objects, I’ll app’int him. Come, Square, don’t be bashful. Walk up to the trough, fodder or no fodder, as the man said to his donkey.”
There was a general giggle at this, and many of the young swains took occasion to nudge the girls alongside them, ostensibly for the purpose of making them see the joke, but really for the pure pleasure of nudging. The Greeks figured Cupid as naked, probably because he wears so many disguises that they could not select a costume for him.
The Squire came to the front. Ralph made an inventory of the agglomeration which bore the name of Squire Hawkins, as follows:
1. A swallowtail coat of indefinite age, worn only on state occasions, when its owner was called to figure in his public capacity. Either the Squire had grown too large or the coat too small.
2. A pair of black gloves, the most phenomenal, abnormal, and unexpected apparition conceivable in Flat Creek district, where the preachers wore no coats in the summer, and where a black glove was never seen except on the hands of the Squire.
3. A wig of that dirty, waxen color so common to wigs. This one showed a continual inclination to slip off the owner’s smooth, bald pate, and the Squire had frequently to adjust it. As his hair had been red, the wig did not accord with his face, and the hair ungrayed was doubly discordant with a countenance shrivelled by age.
4. A semicircular row of whiskers hedging the edge of the jaw and chin. These were dyed a frightful dead-black, such a color as belonged to no natural hair or beard that ever existed. At the roots there was a quarter of an inch of white, giving the whiskers the appearance of having been stuck on.
5. A pair of spectacles “with tortoiseshell rim.” Wont to slip off.
6. A glass eye, purchased of a peddler, and differing in color from its natural mate, perpetually getting out of focus by turning in or out.
7. A set of false teeth, badly fitted, and given to bobbing up and down.
8. The Squire proper, to whom these patches were loosely attached.
It is an old story that a boy wrote home to his father begging him to come West, because “mighty mean men get into office out here.” But Ralph concluded that some Yankees had taught school in Hoopole County who would not have held a high place in the educational institutions of Massachusetts. Hawkins had some New England idioms, but they were well overlaid by a Western pronunciation.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, shoving up his spectacles, and sucking his lips over his white teeth to keep them in place, “ladies and gentlemen, young men and maidens, raley I’m obleeged to Mr. Means fer this honor,” and the Squire took both hands and turned the top of his head round half an inch. Then he adjusted his spectacles. Whether he was obliged to Mr. Means for the honor of being compared to a donkey was not clear. “I feel in the inmost compartments of my animal spirits a most happifying sense of the success and futility of all my endeavors to sarve the people of Flat Creek deestrick, and the people of Tomkins township, in my weak way and manner.” This burst of eloquence was delivered with a constrained air and an apparent sense
