This class was made up of four pupils, two boys and two girls, tall, awkward creatures, who went to the front of the room twice a day and read in a sing-song tone out of two books which were the joint possession of the quartette.  The girls used always to stand in class with their arms around each other and their heads leaned together, as they swayed back and forth and rattled over the words of the page; and the boys leaned back against the wall, usually standing on one leg and sticking the other foot up on the wall behind them.

“Dodd” was a pigmy beside these, but he read better than any of them, and soon convinced Amos that he, “Dodd,” must be taken down a peg, or he, Amos, would find himself looked down upon by his pupils, who would see him worsted by this stripling.

He strove to nettle the boy in many ways, but “Dodd” bore the slings and arrows with a good deal of fortitude, and seemed to avoid a clash.  The experience with his grandfather had had a very softening effect upon him, and he was slow to forget the lesson.  He tried to be good, and did his best for many weeks.

But Amos could ill endure the condition into which affairs were drifting.  Every day the boy improved in his reading, till it got so that whenever he read all the school stopped to listen.  This the teacher felt would not do, and besides this, he had met the parson, and “argyed” with him once, and it was the popular verdict that he had not come out ahead in the encounter.  All of which tended to make him bear down on “Dodd,” till finally he resolved that he would have a row with the boy and that it should be in the reading class.

Do not start at this, beloved.  The thing has been done multitudes of times, not only in the country, but in the city as well, and many a child has been made to suffer for the sake of satisfying grudges that existed between teachers and parents.

So Amos was bound to settle with “Dodd.”  He watched his chance, and along in early winter he found what he was looking for.

The reading class was on duty, and “Dodd” was leading, as he had for several months.  The lesson for the day was “The Lone Indian,” and related the woes of that poor savage, who, in old age, returned to the hunting grounds of his young manhood, only to find them gone, and in their places villages and fenced farms.

“He leaned against a tree,” the narrative continued, “Dodd” reading it in a sympathetic tone, being greatly overcome by the story, “and gazed upon the landscape that he had once known so well.”

He paused suddenly, and a tear or two fell on his book.

“Stop!” exclaimed Amos Waughops, brandishing a long stick which he always carried in his right hand and waved to and fro as he talked to the children, as though he were a great general, in the heat of battle, swinging his sword and urging his men to the charge, “What are you crying about?  Eh?  Look up here!  Look up, I say!  Do you intend to mind me?”