Upon a late September day forty-nine years and some months before that upon which Gabe Bearse came to Jed Winslow’s windmill shop in Orham with the news of Leander Babbitt’s enlistment, Miss Floretta Thompson came to that village to teach the “downstairs” school.  Miss Thompson was an orphan.  Her father had kept a small drug store in a town in western Massachusetts.  Her mother had been a clergyman’s daughter.  Both had died when she was in her ’teens.  Now, at twenty, she came to Cape Cod, pale, slim, with a wealth of light brown hair and a pair of large, dreamy brown eyes.  Her taste in dress was peculiar, even eccentric, and Orham soon discovered that she, herself, was also somewhat eccentric.

As a schoolteacher she was not an unqualified success.  The “downstairs” curriculum was not extensive nor very exacting, but it was supposed to impart to the boys and girls of from seven to twelve a rudimentary knowledge of the three R’s and of geography.  In the first two R’s, “readin’ and ’ritin’,” Miss Thompson was proficient.  She wrote a flowery Spencerian, which was beautifully “shaded” and looked well on the blackboard, and reading was the dissipation of her spare moments.  The third “R,” ’rithmetic, she loathed.

Youth, even at the ages of from seven to twelve, is only too proficient in learning to evade hard work.  The fact that Teacher took no delight in traveling the prosaic highways of addition, multiplication and division, but could be easily lured to wander the flowery lanes of romantic fiction, was soon grasped by the downstairs pupils.  The hour set for recitation by the first class in arithmetic was often and often monopolized by a hold-over of the first class in reading, while Miss Floretta, artfully spurred by questions asked by the older scholars, rhapsodized on the beauties of James Fenimore Cooper’s “Uncas,” or Dickens’ “Little Nell,” or Scott’s “Ellen.”  Some of us antiques, then tow-headed little shavers in the front seats, can still remember Miss Floretta’s rendition of the lines: 

“And Saxon—­I am Roderick Dhu!”

The extremely genteel, not to say ladylike, elocution of the Highland chief and the indescribable rising inflection and emphasis on the “I.”

These literary rambles had their inevitable effect, an effect noted, after a time, and called to the attention of the school committee by old Captain Lycurgus Batcheldor, whose two grandchildren were among the ramblers.

“Say,” demanded Captain Lycurgus, “how old does a young-one have to be afore it’s supposed to know how much four times eight is?  My Sarah’s Nathan is pretty nigh ten and he don’t know it.  Gave me three answers he did; first that ’twas forty-eight, then that ’twas eighty-four and then that he’d forgot what ’twas.  But I noticed he could tell me a whole string about some feller called Lockintar or Lochinvar or some such outlandish name, and not only his name but where he came from, which was out west somewheres.  A poetry piece ‘twas; Nate said the teacher’d been speakin’ it to ’em.  I ain’t got no objection to speakin’ pieces, but I do object to bein’ told that four times eight is eighty-four, ‘specially when I’m buyin’ codfish at eight cents a pound.  I ain’t on the school committee, but if I was—­”