That is the way they all talk.  After all, it is probably pretty much like other inland New England towns in point of “salubrity,”—­that is, gives people their choice of dysentery or fever every autumn, with a season-ticket for consumption, good all the year round.  And so of the other pretences.  “Pigwacket audience,” forsooth!  Was there ever an audience anywhere, though there wasn’t a pair of eyes in it brighter than pickled oysters, that did n’t think it was “distinguished for intelligence"?—­“The preached word”!  That means the Rev. Jabez Grubb’s sermons.  “Temperance society”!  “Excellent schools”!  Ah, that is just what we were talking about.

The truth was, that District No. 1, Pigwacket Centre, had had a good deal of trouble of late with its schoolmasters.  The committee had done their best, but there were a number of well-grown and pretty rough young fellows who had got the upper-hand of the masters, and meant to keep it.  Two dynasties had fallen before the uprising of this fierce democracy.  This was a thing that used to be not very uncommon; but in so “intelligent” a community as that of Pigwacket Centre, in an era of public libraries and lyceum-lectures, it was portentous and alarming.

The rebellion began under the ferule of Master Weeks, a slender youth from a country college, underfed, thin-blooded, sloping-shouldered, knock-kneed, straight-haired, weak-bearded, pale-eyed, wide-pupilled, half-colored; a common type enough in in-door races, not rich enough to pick and choose in their alliances.  Nature kills off a good many of this sort in the first teething-time, a few in later childhood, a good many again in early adolescence; but every now and then one runs the gauntlet of her various diseases, or rather forms of one disease, and grows up, as Master Weeks had done.

It was a very foolish thing for him to try to inflict personal punishment on such a lusty young fellow as Abner Briggs, Junior, one of the “hardest customers” in the way of a rough-and-tumble fight that there were anywhere round.  No doubt he had been insolent, but it would have been better to overlook it.  It pains me to report the events which took place when the master made his rash attempt to maintain his authority.  Abner Briggs, Junior, was a great, hulking fellow, who had been bred to butchering, but urged by his parents to attend school, in order to learn the elegant accomplishments of reading and writing, in which he was sadly deficient.  He was in the habit of talking and laughing pretty loud in school-hours, of throwing wads of paper reduced to a pulp by a natural and easy process, of occasional insolence and general negligence.  One of the soft, but unpleasant missiles just alluded to flew by the master’s head one morning, and flattened itself against the wall, where it adhered in the form of a convex mass in alto rilievo.  The master looked round and saw the young butcher’s arm in an attitude which pointed to it unequivocally as the source from which the projectile had taken its flight.