Camp-meeting time was over, and the church at The Corners was to open
for its regular Sunday services.
"Both Satan and the parson have had a vacation," said Mr. Stagg, "and
now they can tackle each other again and see which'll get the strangle
hold 'twixt now and revival time."
"You should not say such things, especially before the child, Joseph
Stagg," admonished Aunty Rose.
Carolyn May, however, seemed not to have heard Uncle Joe's pessimistic
remark; she was too greatly excited by the prospect of Sunday-school.
And the very next week-day school would begin!
By this first week in September the little girl was quite settled in her
new home at The Corners. Prince was still a doubtful addition to the
family, both Uncle Joe and Aunty Rose plainly having misgivings about
him. But in regard to the little girl herself, the hardware merchant and
the housekeeper were of one opinion, even though they did not admit it
to each other.
Aunty Rose remained, apparently, as austere as ever, while Joseph Stagg
was quite as much immersed in business as formerly. Yet there were
times, when she and the child were alone, that Mrs. Kennedy unbent, in a
greater or less degree. And on the part of Joseph Stagg, he found
himself thinking of sunny-haired, blue-eyed "Hannah's Car'lyn" with
increasing frequency.
"Didn't you ever have any little girls, Aunty Rose?" Carolyn May asked
the housekeeper on one of these intimate occasions. "Or little boys? I
mean of your very own."
"Yes," said Aunty Rose in a matter-of-fact tone. "Three. But only to
have them in my arms for a very little while. Each died soon after
coming to me. There was something quite wrong with them all, so the
doctors said."
"Oh, my dear! All three of them?" sighed Carolyn May.
"Two girls and a boy. Only one lived to be three months old. They are
all buried behind the church yonder. My husband, Frank Kennedy, was not
one of us. I married out of Meeting."
The little girl knew that she meant her husband, long since dead, had
not been a member of the congregation of Friends. She leaned against
Mrs. Kennedy's chair and tucked what was meant to be a comforting hand
into that of Aunty Rose.
"Now I know something about you," Carolyn May said softly.
"What is that?" asked the woman, her eyes smiling at the child if her
lips did not.
"I know why it is you don't know just how to cuddle little girls and
show 'em how much you love 'em. _All_ little children, I mean--not only
me."
Aunty Rose looked down at her with unchanging countenance, but Carolyn
May looked fearlessly up into the woman's face. No amount of grimness
there could trouble the child now. For she knew something else about
Aunty Rose. The housekeeper loved her!
"Yes, you didn't have your little babies long enough to learn how to
cuddle and snug 'em up. That's it. You ought to learn, Aunty Rose."
"What for?" asked Aunty Rose Kennedy rather sharply.
"Why! so you could take me up into your lap and hug and kiss me--just as
my mamma used to do."
"You can't teach an old dog new tricks, I guess, Car'lyn May," said
Aunty Rose. "Seems to me too much hugging spoils children."
"Oh, no, indeed!" cried the little girl confidently. "Never! My papa
used to snug me up lots. Do you know what he used to call me?"
"No."
"It was just for fun, you know. Just a pet name. Snuggy. He 'most always
called me that. 'Cause I liked to be snuggled up."
Aunty Rose made no rejoinder.
The next morning early Carolyn May, with Prince, went over into the
churchyard and found the three little stones in a row. She knew they
must be the right ones, for there was a bigger stone, with the
inscription, "Frank Kennedy, beloved spouse of Rose Kennedy," upon it.
"Spouse" puzzled the little girl at first, but she felt timid about
asking Aunty Rose about it.
The names on the three little stones were Emeline, Frank, Jr., and
Clarissa. Weeds and tall grass had begun to sprout about the tombstones
in the old churchyard.
Carolyn May pulled the unsightly weeds from about the little,
lozenge-shaped stones and about the taller one, and she dug out a mullen
plant that grew on one of the graves.
While she was thus engaged, a tall man in black--looking rather "weedy"
himself, if the truth were told--came across the graveyard and stood
beside her. He wore a broad band of crêpe around his hat and on his arm,
and was very grave and serious-looking.
"Who are you, little girl?" he asked, his voice being quite agreeable
and his tone kindly.
"I'm Car'lyn May, if you please," she replied, looking up at him
frankly.
"Car'lyn May Stagg?" he asked. "You're Mr. Stagg's little girl? I've
heard of you."
"Car'lyn May Cameron," she corrected seriously. "I'm only staying with
Uncle Joe. He is my guardian, and he had to take me, of course, when my
papa and mamma were lost at sea."
"Indeed?" returned the gentleman. "Do you know who I am?"
"I--I think," said Carolyn May doubtfully, "that you must be the
undertaker."
For a moment the gentleman looked startled. Then he flushed a little,
but his eyes twinkled.
"The undertaker?" he murmured. "Do I look like that?"
"Excuse me, sir," said Carolyn May. "I don't really know you, you know.
Maybe you're _not_ the undertaker."
"No, I am not. Though our undertaker, Mr. Snivvins, is a very good man."
"Yes, sir," said the little girl politely.
"I am the pastor here--your pastor, I hope," he said, putting a kind hand
upon her head.
"Oh, I know you now!" said Carolyn May brightly. "You're the man Uncle
Joe says is going to get a strangle hold on Satan, now that vacation is
over."
The Reverend Afton Driggs looked rather odd again. The shocking
frankness of the child came pretty near to flooring him.
"I--ahem! Your uncle compliments me," he said drily. "You don't know that
he is ready to do his share, do you?"
"His share?" repeated the puzzled little girl.
"Towards strangling the Evil One," pursued the minister, a wry smile
curling the corners of his lips.
"Has he got a share in it, too?" asked Carolyn May.
"I think we all should have," said the minister, looking down at her
with returning kindliness in his glance. "Even little girls like you."
Carolyn May looked at him quite seriously.
"Do you s'pose," she asked him confidentially, "that Satan is really
wicked enough to trouble little girls?"
It was a startling bit of new philosophy thus suggested, and Mr. Driggs
shook his head in grave doubt. But it gave him something to think of all
that day; and the first sermon preached in The Corners church that
autumn seemed rather different from most of those solid, indigestible
discourses that the good man was wont to drone out to his parishioners.
"Dunno but it is worth while to give the parson a vacation," pronounced
Uncle Joe at the dinner table. "Seems to me, his sermon this morning
seemed to have a new snap to it. Mebbe he'll give old Satan a hard rub
this winter, after all."
"Joseph Stagg!" said Aunty Rose admonishingly.
"I think he's a very nice man," said Carolyn May suddenly. "And I kep'
awake most of the time--you see, I heard poor Princey howling for me
here, where he was tied up."
"Hum!" ejaculated Mr. Stagg. "Which kept you awake--the dog or the
minister?"
"Oh, I like Mr. Driggs very much," the little girl assured him. "And
he's in great 'fliction, too, I am sure. He--he wears crêpe on his hat
and sleeve."
"Hum, so he does," grunted Mr. Stagg. "He's 'most always in mourning for
somebody or something. I tell him his name ought to be Jeremiah instead
of 'Sweet Afton,'" which comment was, of course, lost on Carolyn May.
But she said seriously:
"Do you s'pose, Uncle Joe, that he _looks up_ enough? It does just seem
to me as though poor Mr. Driggs must always be looking down instead of
looking up to see the sunshine and the blue sky and--and the mountains,
like my papa said you should."
Uncle Joe was silent. Aunty Rose said, very briskly for her:
"And your papa was right, Car'lyn May. He was a very sensible man, I
have no doubt."
"Oh, he was quite a _wonderful_ man," said the little girl with full
assurance.
It was on the following morning that school opened. The Corners district
school was a red building, with a squatty bell tower and two front
doors, standing not far up the road beyond the church. Carolyn May
thought it a very odd-looking schoolhouse indeed.
The school she had attended in New York was a big brick-and-stone
building, with wide corridors, well-ventilated rooms, a lovely basement
gymnasium, a great hall, a roof garden in summer, part of which was
enclosed with glass and steam-heated in winter.
Inside the little red schoolhouse were only rows of desks and
"forms"--all marred, knife-marked, and ink-stained. The initials of the
very "oldest inhabitant" of The Corners, Mr. Jackson Sprague, were
carved in the lid of one desk. And the system of education followed in
this school seemed to be now much what it had been in Mr. Sprague's day.
Miss Minnie Lester taught the school, and although Miss Minnie looked
very sharply through her glasses at one, Carolyn May thought she was
going to love the teacher very much.
Indeed, that was Carolyn May's attitude towards almost everybody whom
she met. She expected to love and to be loved. Was it any wonder she
made so many friends?
But this country school was conducted so differently from the city
school that Carolyn May found herself quite puzzled on many points.
She had to divide her desk with another little girl, Freda Payne. Freda
was a black-eyed, snappy little girl who could whisper out of the corner
of her mouth without the teacher's seeing her do it. She instructed
Carolyn May from time to time regarding this new world the city child
had entered into.
"Goodness me! didn't you ever have a slate before?" she whispered to
Carolyn May.
"No," the little city girl confessed. "They don't let us use them where
I went to school. They make too much noise. And, then, they aren't
clean."
"Clean! Course they're clean, if you keep 'em clean," declared Freda
fiercely.
She showed the stranger the bottle of water she kept in her desk and the
sponge with which she washed her slate.
"But the sponge is dirty. And it smells!" ventured Carolyn May, with a
slight shudder. She had heard of germs, and the mussy-looking bit of
sponge was not an attractive object.
"'Tain't neither!" snapped Freda, making her denial positive with two
negatives. "The boys spit on their slates and wipe 'em off on their
jacket sleeves. _That's_ nasty. But us girls is clean."
Carolyn May could not see it, however, and she ignored her own slate.
"You can't use that pencil to write with on paper," Freda caught her up
with another admonition.
"That's a slate pencil, if it has got wood around it."
"Oh, dear me! Is it?" sighed the new pupil. "And I haven't any other
here, that I can see."
"Well, I'll lend you one. But don't chew the lead. I hate to have folks
chew my lead pencils."
Carolyn May promised not to lunch off of the borrowed writing
instrument.
But these were not all the pitfalls into which the new pupil fell. The
morning session was not half over before she wished for a drink of
water. Of course, she asked her seatmate about it.
"You must raise your hand till Miss Minnie sees you. You'll have to
waggle your hand good to make her look, like enough," added Carolyn
May's mentor. "Then, if she nods, you go back to the entry and get your
drink."
"Oh," was the comment of the city child, and she immediately raised her
hand. She did not have to "waggle" it much before Miss Minnie took
notice of her.
"Well, Carolyn May?" she said.
"May--may I get a drink--please?" almost whispered Carolyn May, for she
felt very much embarrassed.
Miss Minnie nodded. The little girl rose and went back to the entry on
the girls' side of the house. She looked all about this rather large
square room without finding what she sought.
Against two walls were rows of pegs, on which were hung the coats and
hats and dinner baskets, or dinner pails, of the pupils. In the corner
was a shelf with a dingy bucket upon it and a rusty tin dipper hanging
beside it.
Finally, Carolyn May came slowly back to her seat. Miss Minnie was busy
with a class of older pupils. Freda asked--of course out of the corner of
her mobile mouth:
"Did you get your drink?"
Carolyn May shook her head.
"Why not?"
"I didn't see any faucet."
"Faucet! What's that for?" demanded the other little girl.
"Why, to get the water out of. Isn't there a cold-water tank? And don't
you have paper cups?" demanded Carolyn May. "I didn't see a thing like
what we use in our school in New York."
"Mercy me, Carolyn May!" fairly hissed Freda. "What _are_ you talking
about? We don't have water laid on in the schoolhouse like they do at
home. The pump's in the yard. And whoever heard of paper cups? Why,
paper won't hold water!"
"Yes, they do," the other little girl said eagerly. "They are all
folded, and you take one and open it, and it holds water."
"I think you're fibbing!" declared her seatmate flatly.
"Oh!" gasped the new pupil, deeply hurt by the imputation.
"Yes, I do!" said Freda. "I've got a folding nickel cup. But who ever
heard of paper cups? Everybody drinks out of the dipper."
"That rusty old saucepan?" murmured Carolyn May in wonder.
"Huh, you're awful finicky!" scoffed the other.
"Is the water in that pail on the shelf?"
"Yes. And don't you spill none, or Miss Minnie will get mad at you."
"I guess I'll wait till I get home at noon recess," said the little city
girl. "I'm--I'm not so thirsty now."
There proved, too, at the start, to be a little difficulty with Miss
Minnie. Prince would not remain at home. He howled and whined for the
first half of Monday morning's session--as Aunty Rose confessed, almost
driving her mad. Then he slipped his collar and tore away on Carolyn
May's cold trail.
He heard the children's voices as they came out of the school at recess,
and charged into the group in search of his little mistress. Carolyn May
was just getting acquainted with the other pupils of her own age and was
enjoying herself very much.
"Carolyn May," pronounced Miss Minnie from the girls' door-stoop, "you
must take that horrid dog home at once! Hurry, or you will be late for
the next class."
Carolyn May was hurt by the teacher's tone and words, and she _knew_
Prince felt bad about it. He fairly slunk out of the schoolyard by her
side, and some of the pupils laughed.
She pulled his collar up a hole tighter and begged Prince to be good and
remain at home till noon. Yet, ten minutes after the session had again
opened there sounded a rattling on the porch floor, and into the school
marched the dog, having drawn the staple with which his chain had been
fastened to the bole of the tree in Mr. Stagg's back yard.
Miss Minnie was both alarmed and angry. Some of the little girls
shrieked and wept when Prince pranced over to Carolyn May's seat.
"If you do not shut that awful dog up so that he cannot follow you here,
Carolyn May, I shall speak to your uncle, Mr. Stagg, about it. Ugh, the
ugly beast! Take him away at once!"
This was entirely too much for the little girl's good temper. Her best
friend, she felt, was maligned.
"Miss Minnie," she said breathlessly, "I don't see how you can say
Prince is ugly. I think he is _beautiful_! And he is just as kind as he
can be!"
She was so hurt and excited because her canine friend was so disliked
that she did not even cry one tear! The teacher, remaining well out of
reach of the dog, repeated her command.
"Take that dog straight home, and don't let him get in this schoolhouse
again! I will not allow the other children to be so frightened."
So Carolyn May's schooldays at The Corners did not begin very happily,
after all. She had always loved and been loved by every teacher she had
ever had before. But Miss Minnie seemed prejudiced against her because
of Prince.
The little girl felt bad about this, but she was of too cheerful a
temperament to droop for long under the pressure of any trouble. The
other children liked her, and Carolyn May found plenty of playmates. She
would never loiter with them, however, in the schoolyard at noon or
after school. Instead, she would hurry home and release poor Prince from
duress.
It had been found impossible to keep the dog on a chain. He had almost
choked himself once, and again had torn his ears getting his collar off.
So the strong chicken coop under the big tree in the back yard which had
first been his prison was again his cell while his little mistress was
at school.
"Of course," Carolyn May said to Aunty Rose, "we mustn't let poor
Princey know it's because of Miss Minnie that he has to be shut up. He
might take a dislike to her, just as she has to him; and that would be
dreadful! If she'd only let him, I know he'd lie down right outside the
schoolroom door while I was inside, and be just as good!"
But Miss Minnie remained obdurate. She did not like any dogs, and in her
eyes Prince was especially objectionable.
One of the bigger girls made up a rhyme about Carolyn May and Prince,
which began:
"_Car'lyn May had a mongrel dog,
Its coat was not white like snow;
And everywhere that Car'lyn went
That dog was sure to go._
"_It followed her to school one day,
Which made Miss Minnie sore;
But when Car'lyn tied the mongrel up,
It was bound to bark and roar._"
There were many more verses; the big girl was always adding new ones.
"I don't mind it--much," Carolyn May confessed to Aunty Rose, "but I
wouldn't like Prince to hear that poetry. His feelings might be hurt."
It was on the last Friday in the month that something happened which
quite changed Miss Minnie's attitude towards "that mongrel."
Incidentally, The Corners, as a community, was fully awakened from its
lethargy, and, as it chanced, like the Sleeping Beauty and all her
retinue, by a Prince.
The school session on Friday afternoons was always shortened. This day
Mr. Brady, one of the school trustees, came to review the school and,
before he left, to pay Miss Minnie her salary for the month.
Carolyn May had permission from Aunty Rose to go calling that afternoon.
Freda Payne, whom she liked very much, lived up the road beyond the
schoolhouse, and she had invited the little city girl to come to see
her. Of course, Prince had to be included in the invitation. Freda fully
understood that, and Carolyn May took him on his leash.
They saw Miss Minnie at her desk when they went past the schoolhouse.
She was correcting written exercises. Carolyn May secretly hoped that
her own was much better than she feared it was.
Not far beyond the schoolhouse Prince began to growl, and the hairs
stiffened on his neck.
"Whatever is the matter with you, Prince?" demanded Carolyn May.
In a moment she saw the cause of the dog's continued agitation. A
roughly dressed, bewhiskered man sat beside the road eating a lunch out
of a newspaper. He leered at Carolyn May and said:
"I guess you got a bad dog there, ain't ye, little girl?"
"Oh, no! He's us'ally very polite," answered Carolyn May. "You _must_ be
still, Prince! You see," she explained, "he doesn't like folks to wear
old clothes. If--if you had on your Sunday suit, I'm quite sure he would
not growl at you."
"He wouldn't, hey?" said the man hoarsely, licking his fingers of the
last crumbs of his lunch. "An' suppose a feller ain't got no Sunday
suit?"
"Why, then, I s'pose Prince wouldn't _ever_ let you come into our
yard--if he was loose."
"Don't you let him loose now, little girl," said the fellow, getting up
hurriedly, and eyeing the angry dog askance.
"Oh, no, sir. We're going visiting up the road. Come away, Prince. I
won't let him touch you," she assured the man.
The latter seemed rather doubtful of her ability to hold the dog long,
and he hobbled away towards the schoolhouse. Prince really objected to
leaving the vicinity, and Carolyn May scolded him all the way up the
road to Freda's house.
Carolyn May had a very pleasant call--Freda's mother even approved of
Prince--and it was an hour before the two started for home. In sight of
the schoolhouse Prince gave evidence again of excitement.
"I wonder what is the matter with you now," Carolyn May began, when
suddenly she sighted what had evidently so disturbed the dog.
A man was crouching under one of the schoolhouse windows, bobbing up now
and then to peer in. It was the man whom they had previously seen beside
the road.
"Hush, Prince!" whispered little Carolyn May, holding the dog by the
collar.
She, too, could see through the open window. Miss Minnie was still at
her desk. She had finished correcting the pupils' papers. Now she had
her bag open and was counting the money Mr. Brady had given her.
"O-o-oh!" breathed Carolyn May, clinging to the eager dog's collar.
The man at the window suddenly left his position and slipped around to
the door. In a moment he appeared in the schoolroom before the startled
teacher.
Miss Minnie screamed. The man, with a rough threat, darted forward to
seize her purse.
Just then Carolyn May unsnapped the leash from Prince's collar and let
him go.
"Save Miss Minnie, Princey!" she cried after the charging dog.
Prince did not trouble about the door. The open window, through which
the tramp had spied upon the schoolmistress, was nearer. He went up the
wall and scrambled over the sill with a savage determination that left
no doubt whatever in the tramp's mind.
With a yell of terror, the fellow bounded out of the door and tore along
the road and through The Corners at a speed never before equalled in
that locality by a Knight of the Road.
Prince lost a little time in recovering his footing and again getting on
the trail of the fleeing tramp. But he was soon baying the fellow past
the blacksmith shop and the store.
The incident called the entire population of The Corners, save the
bedridden, to the windows and doors. For once the little, somnolent
village awoke, and, as before pointed out, a Prince awoke it.
Hiram Lardner, the blacksmith, declared afterwards that "you could have
played checkers on that tramp's coat tails, providin' you could have
kep' up with him."
When Prince came back from the chase, however, the tramp's coat tails
would never serve as a checkerboard, for the dog bore one of them in his
foam-flecked jaws as a souvenir.