In spite of these moral vagaries, the master could not help noticing in her different tasks the working of a quick, restless, and vigorous perception.  She knew neither the hesitancy nor the doubts of childhood.  Her answers in class were always slightly dashed with audacity.  Of course she was not infallible.  But her courage and daring in passing beyond her own depth and that of the floundering little swimmers around her, in their minds outweighed all errors of judgment.  Children are not better than grown people in this respect, I fancy; and whenever the little red hand flashed above her desk, there was a wondering silence, and even the master was sometimes oppressed with a doubt of his own experience and judgment.

Nevertheless, certain attributes which at first amused and entertained his fancy began to afflict him with grave doubts.  He could not but see that Mliss was revengeful, irreverent, and willful.  That there was but one better quality which pertained to her semisavage disposition—­the faculty of physical fortitude and self-sacrifice, and another, though not always an attribute of the noble savage—­Truth.  Mliss was both fearless and sincere; perhaps in such a character the adjectives were synonymous.

The master had been doing some hard thinking on this subject, and had arrived at that conclusion quite common to all who think sincerely, that he was generally the slave of his own prejudices, when he determined to call on the Rev. McSnagley for advice.  This decision was somewhat humiliating to his pride, as he and McSnagley were not friends.  But he thought of Mliss, and the evening of their first meeting; and perhaps with a pardonable superstition that it was not chance alone that had guided her willful feet to the schoolhouse, and perhaps with a complacent consciousness of the rare magnanimity of the act, he choked back his dislike and went to McSnagley.

The reverend gentleman was glad to see him.  Moreover, he observed that the master was looking “peartish,” and hoped he had got over the “neuralgy” and “rheumatiz.”  He himself had been troubled with a dumb “ager” since last conference.  But he had learned to “rastle and pray.”

Pausing a moment to enable the master to write his certain method of curing the dumb “ager” upon the book and volume of his brain, Mr. McSnagley proceeded to inquire after Sister Morpher.  “She is an adornment to ChrisTEWanity, and has a likely growin’ young family,” added Mr. McSnagley; “and there’s that mannerly young gal—­so well behaved—­Miss Clytie.”  In fact, Clytie’s perfections seemed to affect him to such an extent that he dwelt for several minutes upon them.  The master was doubly embarrassed.  In the first place, there was an enforced contrast with poor Mliss in all this praise of Clytie.  Secondly, there was something unpleasantly confidential in his tone of speaking of Mrs. Morpher’s earliest born.  So that the master, after a few futile efforts to say something natural, found it convenient to recall another engagement, and left without asking the information required, but in his after reflections somewhat unjustly giving the Rev. Mr. McSnagley the full benefit of having refused it.