It was half past three o'clock in the afternoon, and the
primer class, settled into the apathy of after-recess fatigue,
presented a straggling front, as they stood listlessly on the floor.
As for the big boys and girls, they also were longing to be at
liberty, but the pretty teacher, Miss Marilla Hender, seemed quite as
energetic as when school was begun in the morning.
The spring breeze blew in at the open door, and even fluttered the
primer leaves, but the back of the room felt hot and close, as if it
were midsummer. The children in the class read their lessons in those
high-keyed, droning voices which older teachers learn to associate
with faint powers of perception. Only one or two of them had an
awakened human look in their eyes, such as Matthew Arnold delighted
himself in finding so often in the school-children of France. Most of
these poor little students were as inadequate, at that weary moment,
to the pursuit of letters as if they had been woolly spring lambs on a
sunny hillside. The teacher corrected and admonished with great
patience, glancing now and then toward points of danger and
insurrection, whence came a suspicious buzz of whispering from behind
a desk-lid or a pair of widespread large geographies. Now and then a
toiling child would rise and come down the aisle, with his forefinger
firm upon a puzzling word as if it were an unclassified insect. It was
a lovely beckoning day out-of-doors. The children felt like captives;
there was something that provoked rebellion in the droning voices, the
buzzing of an early wild bee against the sunlit pane, and even in the
stuffy familiar odor of the place,--the odor of apples and crumbs of
doughnuts and gingerbread in the dinner pails on the high entry nails,
and of all the little gowns and trousers that had brushed through
junipers and young pines on their way to school.
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