“My father is trustee, and I’ve as much right here as you or any one else, and I’m going to stay till I’m ready to go home and you can’t——­” but, before he had completed his defiant sentence, the slightly built teacher was at his side and had grasped the nape of his coat.  It seemed to the lad, that an iron vise had caught his garment and a span of horses were pulling at him.  He clutched desperately at everything within reach and spread his legs apart and curled up his toes in the effort to hook into something that would stay proceedings, but it was in vain.  Out he came from the seat, and to the awed children who were looking on it seemed that his body was elongated to double its length during the process,—­and he was run through the open door, and his hat tossed after him.  Then the teacher walked quietly back to his seat behind the desk on the platform, and without the slightest sign of flurry or mental disturbance, he told one of the sweetest and most delightful incidents to which his pupils had ever listened.  He closed with the promise to give them another at the end of the week, if they continued in the good course on which they were so fairly started.

“He catched me foul,” explained the indignant Tom Britt the following day in discussing his hurried exit from the schoolroom; “if he had only let me know he was coming, it would be him that dove out the door instead of me.”

The sullen youth did not receive much sympathy at first, for Mr. Lathrop was steadily winning the affections of the pupils; but Dick and Fred rebelled at such quiet submission to authority, and acted so sullenly that they, too, were shut out from the privilege of listening to the next story related by the teacher to the rest of the school.  It had been agreed among the three boys that they should refuse to depart when ordered to do so by the instructor, and that when he made a move toward them, they would assail him simultaneously and rout him “horse, foot and dragoons.”

But the business was conducted with such a cyclone rush that the plan of campaign was entirely overturned.  Before the rebels could combine, all three were out doors, so shaken up that they agreed that a new system of resistance would have to be adopted.

And thus it came about that at the noon recess, one day of the following week, the boys of Bushville school gathered in the cool shade of the woods to listen to the plan of the three malcontents for destroying the authority of the school.  It was mainly curiosity on the part of the younger portion, who had little sympathy with the motives of the leaders and were quite sure they would meet with failure.

“I’ve made up my mind that I won’t stand it,” announced Tom, after the situation had been freely discussed; “no boy with any spirit will allow a teacher to run him out of school in the style he served me.”

“What then made you let him do it?” asked little freckled-face Will Horton, from where he lay on the ground.