Master Langdon took his seat and began the exercises of his school.  The smaller boys recited their lessons well enough, but some of the larger ones were negligent and surly.  He noticed one or two of them looking toward the door, as if expecting somebody or something in that direction.  At half past nine o’clock, Abner Briggs, Junior, who had not yet shown himself, made his appearance.  He was followed by his “yallah dog,” without his muzzle, who squatted down very grimly near the door, and gave a wolfish look round the room, as if he were considering which was the plumpest boy to begin with.  The young butcher, meanwhile, went to his seat, looking somewhat flushed, except round the lips, which were hardly as red as common, and set pretty sharply.

“Put out that dog, Abner Briggs!”—­The master spoke as the captain speaks to the helmsman, when there are rocks foaming at the lips, right under his lee.

Abner Briggs answered as the helmsman answers, when he knows he has a mutinous crew round him that mean to run the ship on the reef, and is one of the mutineers himself.  “Put him aout y’rself, ’f ye a’n’t afeard on him!”

The master stepped into the aisle:  The great cur showed his teeth,—­and the devilish instincts of his old wolf-ancestry looked out of his eyes, and flashed from his sharp tusks, and yawned in his wide mouth and deep red gullet.

The movements of animals are so much quicker than those of human beings commonly are, that they avoid blows as easily as one of us steps out of the way of an ox-cart.  It must be a very stupid dog that lets himself be run over by a fast driver in his gig; he can jump out of the wheel’s way after the tire has already touched him.  So, while one is lifting a stick to strike or drawing back his foot to kick, the beast makes his spring, and the blow or the kick comes too late.

It was not so this time.  The master was a fencer, and something of a boxer; he had played at singlestick, and was used to watching an adversary’s eye and coming down on him without any of those premonitory symptoms by which unpractised persons show long beforehand what mischief they meditate.

“Out with you!” he said, fiercely,—­and explained what he meant by a sudden flash of his foot that clashed the yellow dog’s white teeth together like the springing of a bear-trap.  The cur knew he had found his master at the first word and glance, as low animals on four legs, or a smaller number, always do; and the blow took him so by surprise, that it curled him up in an instant, and he went bundling out of the open schoolhouse-door with a most pitiable yelp, and his stump of a tail shut down as close as his owner ever shut the short, stubbed blade of his jack-knife.

It was time for the other cur to find who his master.

“Follow your dog, Abner Briggs!” said Master Langdon.

The stout butcher-youth looked round, but the rebels were all cowed and sat still.