A SPELL COMING.
There was a moment of utter stillness; but the magnetism of Ralph's eye
was too much for Bill Means. The request was so polite, the master's
look was so innocent and yet so determined. Bill often wondered
afterward that he had not "fit" rather than obeyed the request. But
somehow he put the dog out. He was partly surprised, partly inveighed,
partly awed into doing just what he had not intended to do. In the week
that followed, Bill had to fight half a dozen boys for calling him
"Puppy Means." Bill said he wished he'd licked the master on the spot.
'Twould 'a' saved five fights out of the six.
And all that day and the next, the bulldog in the master's eye was a
terror to evil-doers. At the close of school on the second day Bud was
heard to give it as his opinion that "the master wouldn't be much in a
tussle, but he had a heap of thunder and lightning in him."
Did he inflict corporal punishment? inquires some philanthropic friend.
Would you inflict corporal punishment if you were tiger-trainer in Van
Amburgh's happy family? But poor Ralph could never satisfy his
constituency in this regard.
"Don't believe he'll do," was Mr. Pete Jones's comment to Mr. Means.
"Don't thrash enough. Boys won't l'arn 'less you thrash 'em, says I.
Leastways, mine won't. Lay it on good is what I says to a master. Lay it
on good. Don't do no harm. Lickin' and l'arnin' goes together. No
lickin', no l'arnin', says I. Lickin' and l'arnin,' lickin' and larnin',
is the good ole way."
And Mr. Jones, like some wiser people, was the more pleased with his
formula that it had an alliterative sound. Nevertheless, Ralph was
master from this time until the spelling-school came. If only it had not
been for that spelling-school! Many and many a time after the night of
the fatal spelling-school Ralph used to say, "If only it had not been
for that spelling-school!"
There had to be a spelling-school. Not only for the sake of my story,
which would not have been worth the telling if the spelling-school had
not taken place, but because Flat Creek district had to have a
spelling-school. It is the only public literary exercise known in
Hoopole County. It takes the place of lyceum lecture and debating club.
Sis Means, or, as she wished now to be called, Mirandy Means, expressed
herself most positively in favor of it. She said that she 'lowed the
folks in that district couldn't in no wise do without it. But it was
rather to its social than to its intellectual benefits that she
referred. For all the spelling-schools ever seen could not enable her to
stand anywhere but at the foot of the class. There is one branch
diligently taught in a backwoods school. The public mind seems impressed
with the difficulties of English orthography, and there is a solemn
conviction that the chief end of man is to learn to spell. "'Know
Webster's Elementary' came down from Heaven," would be the backwoods
version of the 'Greek saying but that, unfortunately for the Greeks,
their fame has not reached so far. It often happens that the pupil does
not know the meaning of a single word in the lesson. This is of no
consequence. What do you want to know the meaning of a word for? Words
were made to be spelled, and men were probably created that they might
spell them. Hence the necessity for sending a pupil through the
spelling-book five times before you allow him to begin to read, or
indeed to do anything else. Hence the necessity for those long
spelling-classes at the close of each forenoon and afternoon session of
the school, to stand at the head of which is the cherished ambition of
every scholar. Hence, too, the necessity for devoting the whole of the
afternoon session of each Friday to a "spelling-match." In fact,
spelling is the "national game" in Hoopole County. Baseball and croquet
matches are as unknown as Olympian chariot-races. Spelling and
shucking[10] are the only public competitions.
So the fatal spelling-school had to be appointed for the Wednesday of
the second week of the session, just when Ralph felt himself master of
the situation. Not that he was without his annoyances. One of Ralph's
troubles in the week before the spelling-school was that he was loved.
The other that he was hated. And while the time between the appointing
of the spelling tournament and the actual occurrence of that remarkable
event is engaged in elapsing, let me narrate two incidents that made it
for Ralph a trying time.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 10: In naming the several parts of the Indian corn and the
dishes made from it, the English language was put to many shifts. Such
words as _tassel_ and _silk_ were poetically applied to the blossoms;
_stalk_, _blade_, and _ear_ were borrowed from other sorts of corn, and
the Indian tongues were forced to pay tribute to name the dishes
borrowed from the savages. From them we have _hominy_, _pone_, _supawn_,
and _succotash_. For other nouns words were borrowed from English
provincial dialects. _Shuck_ is one of these. On the northern belt,
shucks are the outer covering of nuts; in the middle and southern
regions the word is applied to what in New England is called the husks
of the corn. _Shuck_, however, is much more widely used than _husk_ in
colloquial speech--the farmers in more than half of the United States
are hardly acquainted with the word _husk_ as applied to the envelope of
the ear. _Husk_, in the Middle States, and in some parts of the South
and West, means the bran of the cornmeal, as notably in Davy Crockett's
verse:
"She sifted the meal, she gimme the hus';
She baked the bread, she gimme the crus';
She b'iled the meat, she gimme the bone;
She gimme a kick and sent me home."
In parts of Virginia, before the war, the word _husk_ or _hus'_ meant
the cob or spike of the corn. "I smack you over wid a cawn-hus'" is a
threat I have often heard one negro boy make to another. _Cob_ is
provincial English for ear, and I have known "a cob of corn" used in
Canada for an ear of Indian corn. While writing this note "a cob of
Indian corn "--meaning an ear--appears in the report of an address by a
distinguished man at a recent meeting of the Royal Geographical Society.
A lady tells me that she met, in the book of an English traveller, the
remarkable statement that "the Americans are very fond of the young
grain called cob." These Indian-corn words have reached an accepted
meaning after a competition. To _shell_ corn, among the earliest
settlers of Virginia, meant to take it out of the envelope, which was
presumably called the shell. The analogy is with the shelling of pulse.]