“We’ll tend to his case & Christmas.”  Christmas was two days off.

And Miss Martha remarked with much trepidation that poor Pearson would have to leave.  She’d always been afraid that would be the end of it.  It reminded her of something she heard at the East, the time she was down to Bosting.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 21:  Even the Anti-means Baptists have suffered from the dire spirit of the age.  They are to-day a very respectable body of people calling themselves “Primitive Baptists.”  Perhaps the description in the text never applied to the whole denomination, but only to the Hardshells of certain localities.  Some of these intensely conservative churches, I have reason to believe, were always composed of reputable people.  But what is said above is not in the least exaggerated as a description of many of the churches in Indiana and Illinois.  Their opposition to the temperance reformation was both theoretical and practical.  A rather able minister of the denomination whom I knew as a boy used to lie in besotted drunkenness by the roadside.  I am sorry to confess that he once represented the county in the State legislature.  The piece of a sermon given in this chapter was heard near Cairo, Illinois, in the days before the war.  Most of the preachers were illiterate farmers.  I have heard one of them hold forth two hours at a stretch.  But even in that day there were men among the Hardshells whose ability and character commanded respect.  This was true, especially in Kentucky, where able men like the two Dudleys held to the Antinomian wing of their denomination.  But the Hardshells are perceptibly less hard than they were.  You may march at the rear of the column among Hunkers and Hardshells if you will, but you are obliged to march.  Those who will not go voluntarily, the time-spirit, walking behind, prods onward with a goad.]

CHAPTER XIII.

A STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY

The school had closed on Monday evening as usual.  The boys had been talking in knots all day.  Nothing but the bulldog in the slender, resolute young master had kept down the rising storm.  A teacher who has lost moral support at home, can not long govern a school.  Ralph had effectually lost his popularity in the district, and the worst of it was that he could not divine from just what quarter the ill wind came, except that he felt sure of Small’s agency in it somewhere.  Even Hannah had slighted him, when he called at Means’s on Monday morning to draw the pittance of pay that was due him.