“Goodness heavens! the man will be drowned!” said Miss Mary; and then, with feminine inconsistency, she ran back to the schoolhouse and locked herself in.

That night, while seated at supper with her hostess, the blacksmith’s wife, it came to Miss Mary to ask, demurely, if her husband ever got drunk.  “Abner,” responded Mrs. Stidger reflectively—­“let’s see!  Abner hasn’t been tight since last ’lection.”  Miss Mary would have liked to ask if he preferred lying in the sun on these occasions, and if a cold bath would have hurt him; but this would have involved an explanation, which she did not then care to give.  So she contented herself with opening her gray eyes widely at the red-cheeked Mrs. Stidger—­a fine specimen of Southwestern efflorescence—­and then dismissed the subject altogether.  The next day she wrote to her dearest friend in Boston:  “I think I find the intoxicated portion of this community the least objectionable.  I refer, my dear, to the men, of course.  I do not know anything that could make the women tolerable.”

In less than a week Miss Mary had forgotten this episode, except that her afternoon walks took thereafter, almost unconsciously, another direction.  She noticed, however, that every morning a fresh cluster of azalea, blossoms appeared among the flowers on her desk.  This was not strange, as her little flock were aware of her fondness for flowers, and invariably kept her desk bright with anemones, syringas, and lupines; but, on questioning them, they one and all professed ignorance of the azaleas.  A few days later, Master Johnny Stidger, whose desk was nearest to the window, was suddenly taken with spasms of apparently gratuitous laughter, that threatened the discipline of the school.  All that Miss Mary could get from him was, that some one had been “looking in the winder.”  Irate and indignant, she sallied from her hive to do battle with the intruder.  As she turned the corner of the schoolhouse she came plump upon the quondam drunkard, now perfectly sober, and inexpressibly sheepish and guilty-looking.

These facts Miss Mary was not slow to take a feminine advantage of, in her present humor.  But it was somewhat confusing to observe, also, that the beast, despite some faint signs of past dissipation, was amiable-looking—­in fact, a kind of blond Samson, whose corn-colored silken beard apparently had never yet known the touch of barber’s razor or Delilah’s shears.  So that the cutting speech which quivered on her ready tongue died upon her lips, and she contented herself with receiving his stammering apology with supercilious eyelids and the gathered skirts of uncontamination.  When she re-entered the schoolroom, her eyes fell upon the azaleas with a new sense of revelation; and then she laughed, and the little people all laughed, and they were all unconsciously very happy.