Master Weeks turned pale.  He must “lick” Abner Briggs, Junior, or abdicate.  So he determined to lick Abner Briggs, Junior.

“Come here, Sir!” he said; “you have insulted me and outraged the decency of the schoolroom often enough!  Hold out your hand!”

The young fellow grinned and held it out.  The master struck at it with his black ruler, with a will in the blow and a snapping of the eyes, as much as to say that he meant to make him smart this time.  The young fellow pulled his hand back as the ruler came down, and the master hit himself a vicious blow with it on the right knee.  There are things no man can stand.  The master caught the refractory youth by the collar and began shaking him, or rather shaking himself against him.

“Le’ go o’ that are coat, naow,” said the fellow, “or I ’ll make ye!  ’T ‘ll take tew on yet’ handle me, I tell ye, ‘n’ then ye caant dew it!”—­and the young pupil returned the master’s attention by catching hold of his collar.

When it comes to that, the best man, not exactly in the moral sense, but rather in the material, and more especially the muscular point of view, is very apt to have the best of it, irrespectively of the merits of the case.  So it happened now.  The unfortunate schoolmaster found himself taking the measure of the sanded floor, amidst the general uproar of the school.  From that moment his ferule was broken, and the school-committee very soon had a vacancy to fill.

Master Pigeon, the successor of Master Weeks, was of better stature, but loosely put together, and slender-limbed.  A dreadfully nervous kind of man he was, walked on tiptoe, started at sudden noises, was distressed when he heard a whisper, had a quick, suspicious look, and was always saying, “Hush?” and putting his hands to his ears.  The boys were not long in finding out this nervous weakness, of course.  In less than a week a regular system of torments was inaugurated, full of the most diabolical malice and ingenuity.  The exercises of the conspirators varied from day to day, but consisted mainly of foot-scraping, solos on the slate-pencil, (making it screech on the slate,) falling of heavy books, attacks of coughing, banging of desk-lids, boot-creaking, with sounds as of drawing a cork from time to time, followed by suppressed chuckles.

Master Pigeon grew worse and worse under these inflictions.  The rascally boys always had an excuse for any one trick they were caught at.  “Could n’ help coughin’, Sir.”  “Slipped out o’ m’ han’, Sir.”  “Did n’ go to, Sir.”  “Did n’ dew’t o’ purpose, Sir.”  And so on,—­always the best of reasons for the most outrageous of behavior.  The master weighed himself at the grocer’s on a platform balance, some ten days after he began keeping the school.  At the end of a week he weighed himself again.  He had lost two pounds.  At the end of another week he had lost five.  He made a little calculation, based on these data, from which he learned that in a certain number of months, going on at this rate, he should come to weigh precisely nothing at all; and as this was a sum in subtraction he did not care to work out in practice, Master Pigeon took to himself wings and left the school-committee in possession of a letter of resignation and a vacant place to fill once more.