“The lad is right, Mr. Darrow,” he said, in his quiet, drawling way.  “I wouldn’t punish him before the scholars if I were you, sir.”

“What’s this?  You interfere!” flared out the pedagogue.

“Don’t take it that way, Mr. Darrow,” said Graham.  “You are displeased, and justly so, sir, but boys will be boys.  Andy is the right kind of a lad, I assure you, only in the wrong kind of a place.  They did the same thing with me when I was young.  If they hadn’t, I wouldn’t be here spelling out words of two syllables at twenty-eight years of age.”

Andy’s eyes glistened at the big scholar’s friendliness.  A murmur of approbation ran round the room.

Silently the pedagogue fumed.  The disaffection of the occasion, mild and respectful as it was, disarmed him.  He regarded Andy with a despairing look.  Then he straightened up with great dignity.

“Take your seat, sir!” he ordered Andy severely, marching back to his own desk.

“Yes, sir,” said Andy humbly.

“Pack up your books.”

Andy looked up in dismay.  The fixed glint in the schoolmaster’s eye told him that this new move meant no fooling.

“Now you may go home,” resumed Mr. Darrow, as Andy had obeyed his first mandate.

Andy kept a stiff upper lip, though he felt that the world was slipping away from him.

A picture of an unloving home, a stern, hard mistress who would make use of this, his final disgrace, as a continual club and menace to all his future peace of mind, fairly appalled him.

He arose to his feet, swinging his strapped up books to and fro airily, but there was a dismal catch in his voice as he turned to the teacher’s desk, and said: 

“Mr. Darrow, I guess I would rather take the whipping.”

“Too late,” pronounced the relentless schoolmaster in icy tones.

And then, as Andy reached the door amid the gruesome silence and awe of his sympathetic comrades, Mr. Darrow added the final dreadful words: 

“You are expelled.”

CHAPTER II

Hoop-la!

Andy Wildwood passed out of the village schoolhouse an anxious and desolate boy.

The brightest of sunshine gilded the spires and steeples of the village.  It flooded highway and meadows with rich yellow light, but Andy, swinging his school books over his shoulder, walked on with drooping head and a cheerless heart.

“It’s pretty bad, it’s just the very worst!” he said with a deep sigh, as he reached a stile and sat down a-straddle of it.

Andy tossed his books up into the hollow of a familiar oak near at hand.  Then he fell to serious thinking.

His gaze roving over the landscape, lit on the farmhouse of Jabez Dale.  It revived the recent allusion of the old schoolmaster.