struggles for great prizes, and the chalk dust choked me when I thought of him, and then turned to myself as I stood there, trying to demonstrate to half a dozen girls and boys that the total sum of a single column of six figures was twenty-four.  Tim had been promoted and was a full-fledged clerk now.  There were many steps ahead for him, but he was going to climb them rung by rung; and what joy there is in drawing one’s self up by one’s own strength!  I was at the top of my ladder—­at the very pinnacle of learning in Black Log.  Even now I was unfolding to the marvelling eyes of the children of the valley the mysteries of that great science, physical geography.  I was explaining to them the trend of the Rockies and the Himalayas, and of other mountains I should never see; I was telling them why it snowed, and unfolding the phenomena of the aurora borealis.  Alexander with no more worlds to conquer was a sorry spectacle.  We pedagogues who have mastered physical geography are Alexanders.  But if I was bound to the pinnacle of learning so that I could neither fly nor fall, I could at least watch Tim as he struggled higher and higher.  And Mary was watching with me!  That was what made my work that day seem doubly irksome and the hours trebly long; for she was waiting to hear from him, and when the sun seemed to rest on the mill gable I should be free to go to her.  So the minutes dragged.  It made me angry.  Ordinarily I speak quietly to the scholars, but now I fairly bellowed at Chester Holmes, who was reading in such a loud tone that he disturbed me and called me to the real business of the moment.

“Don’t say Dooglas!” I cried.

“That’s the way Teacher Thomas used to say it,” retorted Chester, sitting down on the long bench where the Fifth Reader class was posted.

“D-o-u-g—­dug—­Douglas,” I snapped.

“‘Douglas round him drew his cloak.’  Now, Ira Snarkle, you may read five lines, beginning with the second stanza.”

Ira was very tall for his sixteen years.  His clothes had never caught up to him, for his trousers always failed by two inches to grasp his shoe-tops, and his coat had a terrible struggle to touch the top of his trousers.  For the shortness of the sleeves he partly compensated with a pair of bright red worsted wristers.  When he bent his elbows the sleeves flew up his arms, and these wristers became the most conspicuous thing in his whole attire.

Ira was holding his book in the correct position now, so I saw a length of bare arms embraced at the wrists by brilliant bands of red.

“’My manors, halls, and bowers shall still be open at my soveryne’s will,’” chanted the boy.

He paused, and to illustrate the imperious humor of the Scot, he waved his fingers and a red wrister at me.  The gesture unnerved him for a moment, and he had to go thumbing over the page to find his place.  He caught it again and chanted on—­“’At my sover-sover-yne’s will.  To each one whom he lists, however unmeet to be the owner’s peer.’”