“Father would chuckle if he knew I was sick of it already,” he thought, as he walked across the play-ground to the long red road that ran past the school.  “Well, one week is ended, at any rate.  I’ve earned my own living for five whole days, and that is something I could never say before in all my twenty-four years of existence.  It is an exhilarating thought.  But teaching the Lindsay district school is distinctly not exhilarating—­at least in such a well-behaved school as this, where the pupils are so painfully good that I haven’t even the traditional excitement of thrashing obstreperous bad boys.  Everything seems to go by clock work in Lindsay educational institution.  Larry must certainly have possessed a marked gift for organizing and drilling.  I feel as if I were merely a big cog in an orderly machine that ran itself.  However, I understand that there are some pupils who haven’t shown up yet, and who, according to all reports, have not yet had the old Adam totally drilled out of them.  They may make things more interesting.  Also a few more compositions, such as John Reid’s, would furnish some spice to professional life.”

Eric’s laughter wakened the echoes as he swung into the road down the long sloping hill.  He had given his fourth grade pupils their own choice of subjects in the composition class that morning, and John Reid, a sober, matter-of-fact little urchin, with not the slightest embryonic development of a sense of humour, had, acting upon the whispered suggestion of a roguish desk-mate, elected to write upon “Courting.”  His opening sentence made Eric’s face twitch mutinously whenever he recalled it during the day.  “Courting is a very pleasant thing which a great many people go too far with.”

The distant hills and wooded uplands were tremulous and aerial in delicate spring-time gauzes of pearl and purple.  The young, green-leafed maples crowded thickly to the very edge of the road on either side, but beyond them were emerald fields basking in sunshine, over which cloud shadows rolled, broadened, and vanished.  Far below the fields a calm ocean slept bluely, and sighed in its sleep, with the murmur that rings for ever in the ear of those whose good fortune it is to have been born within the sound of it.

Now and then Eric met some callow, check-shirted, bare-legged lad on horseback, or a shrewd-faced farmer in a cart, who nodded and called out cheerily, “Howdy, Master?” A young girl, with a rosy, oval face, dimpled cheeks, and pretty dark eyes filled with shy coquetry, passed him, looking as if she would not be at all averse to a better acquaintance with the new teacher.

Half way down the hill Eric met a shambling, old gray horse drawing an express wagon which had seen better days.  The driver was a woman:  she appeared to be one of those drab-tinted individuals who can never have felt a rosy emotion in all their lives.  She stopped her horse, and beckoned Eric over to her with the knobby handle of a faded and bony umbrella.