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ELLA
_A Little Schoolgirl of the Sixties_
[Illustration: ELLA]
ELLA
_A Little Schoolgirl of the Sixties_
A Book for Children and for
Grown-Ups who Remember
BY
EVA MARCH TAPPAN
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
RUTH J. BEST
[Illustration: Decoration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1923
COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY EVA MARCH TAPPAN
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
TO
“BOY COUSIN” AND THE DAYS ON
THE BEARCAMP
CONTENTS
I. A LITTLE GIRL AND A BIG SEMINARY 1
II. A YOUNG LADY OF THE ENGLISH AND CLASSICAL GRADUATING COURSE 11
III. THE THREE TRAGEDIES OF ELLA’S SEMINARY LIFE 19
IV. GRADUATION DAY AND ITS MISFORTUNES 30
V. ON THE WAY TO GRANDMOTHER’S 40
VI. THE REAL NEW HAMPSHIRE 51
VII. BOY COUSIN 61
VIII. RAINY DAYS AND SUNDAYS 71
IX. BOOKS AND PLAY 80
X. LIKE OTHER GIRLS 94
XI. ELLA’S FIRST DAY IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOL 103
XII. “FOOSLE” REMAINS 111
XIII. THE “TORIES’ ALPHABET” 120
XIV. AMONG THE “WELL-BEHAVED ANGELS” 131
XV. ELLA AND THE PRINCIPAL 142
XVI. WHEN THE COMMITTEE MEN CAME 151
XVII. THE HIGH SCHOOL EXAMINATIONS 160
APPENDIX: THE EXAMINATION QUESTIONS OF 1869 171
ELLA
CHAPTER I
A LITTLE GIRL AND A BIG SEMINARY
The nicest thing that ever happened to a little girl eight years
old was going to happen to Ella, and she was so delighted that she
could hardly sit still in the big clumsy stage-coach that rolled and
shook and swung slowly away from the city. Uphill and downhill it
went, past ponds and meadows and brooks and woods, and little new
houses and big old homesteads shaded by ancient elms or maples. Every
roll of the wheels brought the little passenger nearer to perfect
happiness.
Ella was going to live in a seminary, and surely nothing could be
more charming than that. She knew all about seminaries, for she had
visited one when she was little—at least two years before. The girls
had petted her and given her candy; the principal had presented her
with a story-book. Best of all, she had slept in an old-fashioned
bed with a canopy, such a bed as she had never seen anywhere else.
What could be more delightful! And now she was going to have every
day such pleasures as these, and no one knew how much more marvelous
ones.
By and by the stage came to a scattered village with a church or
two, a schoolhouse, and a post-office. After the mail had been left,
the driver turned up a long avenue with fields and a line of trees
on either hand. At the head of the avenue was a circle of tall fir
trees, and back of the circle was a large white building with a wing
at each end, a narrow piazza in front, and tall fluted columns rising
from its floor to the top of the second story.
The driver called “Whoa!” A tall man came from somewhere and shook
hands with Ella’s mother and with herself. Then he led the way
upstairs to some bare, almost unfurnished rooms. The mother was to
use the furniture from her old home, and it had not yet arrived.
After a little talk, they all went down some dark and winding stairs
to the dining-room, a large, low, gloomy basement room with two long
tables. The end of one of them was “set,” and there Ella and her
mother and the tall man and two or three other grown-ups ate supper.
A little later Ella and her mother went up to the almost unfurnished
rooms. Ella stood looking through the open door down the lonely
corridor. There were no nice girls about; there was no canopy to the
bed; there were no story-books; there was no one to talk to her.
Everybody was grown up; there were no children. There were no city
lights, and the twilight seemed to be shutting down faster than it
ever did before.
“Oh, this doesn’t seem one bit, not one single bit, like a seminary,”
Ella cried.
The mother gathered her into her lap, and there the little girl
sobbed away her loneliness and disappointment, and forgot it all in
sleep. But the mother sat beside the window, looking out into the
darkness and the past; for it was here that she and the father had
first met, in the old joyful student days; and now he was gone, and
she had come back, alone, to teach students who were, as she had then
been, at the happy beginnings.
When the morning came, things were better, Ella thought. The sun
shone, and people began to gather. The first arrivals were teachers
and boy and girl students. Then came students of earlier days,
for the seminary had been closed for some years and was now to be
reopened. There were people from the village and the neighboring
country, and a little later, when the stage from the city drove up,
there were a number of dignified middle-aged men with long beards.
These men were to make speeches.
The mother was helping to welcome the guests, and Ella wandered
around alone. Before long she met a boy a little smaller than
herself. The two children looked at each other.
“What’s your name?” the boy asked.
“Ella. What’s yours?”
“John. My father’s the principal. What did you have Christmas?”
“I had a doll and a bedstead for her and a book of fairy stories,”
the little girl replied. “What did you have?”
“I had a sled and a rubber ball and some red mittens.”
“I had a sled three Christmases ago, when I was little,” said Ella.
“Its name is Thomas Jefferson. How old are you?”
“Six. But I’m going on seven,” he added quickly.
Ella was eight, going on nine, and she thought that a boy who was
only six was hardly more than a baby; but he was better than nobody,
so they spent most of the day together.
It was a full day. The hundreds of people went through the building;
they ate a collation in the basement dining-room; they renewed old
friendships; and at two o’clock they assembled in the little grove
fronting the main door to listen to the speeches.
And speeches there were, indeed; speeches on the old days of the
seminary and on the plans for its future; and of course there was
one on “The true theory of education,” delivered by the man who knew
least about that subject. The lieutenant-governor of the State sent a
check for $100 for the library; the mayor of the capital of the State
sent one for $250. Ticknor & Fields, Little & Brown, and Wendell
Phillips all presented books. Everybody was jubilant, and sunset was
only one hour distant when with three hearty cheers for the seminary
the people said good-bye to one another, and all but the teachers
and the students started for their homes.
Ella had not heard any of the speeches, but she had found where early
goldenrod and asters were growing; she had learned that there was a
beautiful lake whose shore was a fine place to pick up pebbles and go
in wading; and she had discovered on the hastily arranged shelves of
the library some books that looked interesting. She and John had only
one grievance, namely, that the watermelon had given out before it
came to their end of the table.
The next day classes were arranged and the regular life of the
seminary began. Ella was delighted to find that she was to be called
a “student” just as if she had been grown up, and when a young man,
already lonesome for the little sister at home, asked her to sit on
his knee, she refused. It was of course quite proper for a little
girl to sit on the knee of an elderly gentleman, as he seemed to her,
but she did not think that one “student” ought to sit on the knee of
another.
Ella’s mother had her own “theory of education.” She thought that
it was better for young children to be out of doors than in a
schoolroom, and that, when they began to study, arithmetic and
foreign languages should come first. Ella had never been to school
or been taught at home. Somehow, she had learned to read, no one
knew exactly how, and she had read every book that had come to
hand if it looked at all interesting. One of these books was a
small arithmetic. It was quite the fashion in those days to bind
schoolbooks in paper of a bright salmon pink. Ella liked the color,
and the result was that she had picked up some familiarity with
addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.
The professor of mathematics was a courteous, scholarly young man
just out of college. He said that it would not trouble him in the
least to have in one of his classes a little girl in a short-sleeved,
low-necked blue muslin dress and “ankle-ties.” Apparently the tall
young men and young women students did not object either; and the
result was that for half an hour every morning Ella made groups of
straggling figures on the blackboard, and with the kindly teaching
of “my professor,” as she proudly called the young instructor, she
learned to “invert the divisor and proceed as in multiplication.” She
learned also that a decimal point has an uncanny power to reduce a
comfortable number of dollars to mere copper cents. She even learned
that “If a student purchased a Latin grammar for $0.75, a Virgil
for $3.75, a Greek lexicon for $4.75, a Homer for $1.25, an English
dictionary for $3.75, and a Greek Testament for $0.75,” the whole
cost of his purchases would amount to $15. This was her favorite
among the “Practical Problems.” The teacher never guessed the reason,
but it was because she had read a story about a carrier pigeon, and
she was glad that the student had a “homer.”
Ella learned that “cwt.” meant _hundredweight_, that “d” meant
_penny_, and that a queer sign somewhat like a written “L” meant
_pound_. Why these things should be, she had no idea; she supposed
grown people had just made them up. She could overlook even such
foolishness as this, but she did draw the line at learning the
multiplication table. It was in her book, and she could turn to
it at any time, so why should she bother to learn it? The young
professor was always charitable to a new idea. He looked at the child
thoughtfully; maybe she was in the right. At any rate, he only smiled
when he saw how rapidly a certain page in her arithmetic was wearing
out. Before it had quite disappeared, the multiplication table, even
with the eights and nines, was as firmly fixed in the small pupil’s
memory as if she had learned it with tears and lamentations.
Ella spelled rather unusually well, perhaps because in all her eight
years she had seldom seen or heard a word spelled incorrectly; but
her handwriting was about as bad as it could be, especially toward
the end of the page, where the “loops and tails” pointed as many ways
as if they had been an explosion of fireworks. The tall principal,
John’s father, taught penmanship, and the little girl, with a
copybook, a red-painted penholder, and a viciously sharp “Gillott,
303,” took her place at one of the long, slanting tables in the hall.
It was much too high for her, but no one was troubled about that in
those days. If a table was too high, it was because the child was
too short, and that was all there was to it.
Day after day, Ella wrote in her copybook whole pages of such
thrilling statements as, “Be good and you will be happy,” and,
“Honesty is the best policy.” Of the truth of the first she was by
no means convinced, for she remembered being—of necessity—very well
behaved, indeed, when she was not at all happy. As to the second, she
had no idea what “policy” was. She asked the principal very shyly
what the sentence meant, and he said it meant that little boys and
girls must always tell the truth. Of course no decent children ever
told lies, thought Ella, with a vague indignation. She pondered over
the reply, and at length made up her mind that the writing-book must
have been printed for children that were ragged and dirty and said
“ain’t got none.” She had to finish the page, but every line was
worse written than the one before it. The principal looked a little
grave and asked if she was sure that she had done her best. Ella hung
her head and said nothing; but maybe she had done her best—under the
circumstances.
The principal tried his utmost to teach her to write the fine
“Spencerian” hand that was then so admired; but the wicked little
“Gillott, 303,” continued to stick in the paper and make sprays of
ink all about—which Ella rather admired as incipient pictures—and the
red-painted wooden penholder still aimed at whatever point of the
compass happened to suit the comfort of the little cramped fingers.
“Where should the pen point?” the principal would patiently ask; and
with equal patience the pupil would reply, “Over the right shoulder.”
It would turn into place obediently, but long before the teacher had
reached the other end of the long table, it was again pointing out
the north window toward the lake or out the south window to the hill
and the rocks. And why not? Where the thoughts were, surely the pen
might point also.
Ella felt as if she was quite a busy little girl, for besides her
lessons in arithmetic and penmanship, there was half an hour of
French every day. It was good strong old-fashioned French, too,
learned by main force from a grammar. She recited patiently, “Ah,
bay, say, day,” etc., as she was taught; but in her heart of hearts
she thought it utter foolishness to spoil perfectly good English
letters by giving them such names. She learned that there were such
things as nasal sounds, objected to in English, but highly esteemed
in French; and she learned to translate into the French language
and pronounce—with an accent that would have thrown the politest
Frenchman into a state of collapse—such interesting dialogue as,
“Have you the girl’s glove?” “No, sir, but I have the cook’s hat”;
and such bits of tragedy as, “My brother’s tailor has broken my
slate,” or—most touching of all—“I liked the little girl, but she did
not like me.”
French, even grammar French, carried Ella into a new world. She
concluded that to harmonize with its caprices she ought to take
a French name when, so to speak, she entered France by way of
Fasquelle’s Grammar and the French recitation room. Somewhere she had
heard the word “elephantine,” and she had read, in English, about
Fantine and Cosette. She concluded that this fine-sounding word—only
she would spell it “E[^l]efânti[^n]e” and put on plenty of accents,
circumflexes, because she thought acutes and graves had an unfinished
look—would accord nicely with her own name and would also be a
compliment to the French, especially if it was pronounced with a good
strong nasal sound in the middle of the word.
She was rather too shy to ask the French teacher to call her
“E[^l]efânti[^n]e,” but she wrote the name in her Fasquelle, and had
fine times saying it over to herself when she was alone. One day
the mother happened to take up the book, and she showed Ella in the
dictionary what the word meant. All the poetry went out of it then,
for Ella always bowed to the authority of the big dictionary; and she
promptly rubbed out the new name, accents and all.