The Flag-Raising | Page 9

Legion lay dying in Algiers, There was lack of
woman's nursing, there was dearth of woman's tears."
How she loved the swing and the sentiment of it! How her young voice
quivered whenever she came to the refrain:-- "But we'll meet no more
at Bingen, dear Bingen on the Rhine." It always sounded beautiful in
her ears, as she sent her tearful little treble into the clear morning air.
Another early favorite (for we must remember that Rebecca's only
knowledge of the great world of poetry consisted of the selections in
vogue in the old school Readers)was:-- "Woodman, spare that tree!
Touch not a single bough! In youth it sheltered me, And I'll protect it
now."
When Emma Jane Perkins walked through the "short cut" with her, the
two children used to render this with appropriate dramatic action.
Emma Jane always chose to be the woodman because she had nothing
to do but raise on high an imaginary axe. On the one occasion when she
essayed the part of the tree's romantic protector, she represented herself
as feeling "so awful foolish" that she refused to undertake it again,
much to the secret delight of Rebecca, who found the woodman's role
much too tame for her vaulting ambition. She reveled in the
impassioned appeal of the poet, and implored the ruthless woodman to
be as brutal as possible with the axe, so that she might properly put
greater spirit into her lines. One morning, feeling more frisky than
usual, she fell upon her knees and wept in the woodman's petticoat.
Curiously enough, her sense of proportion rejected this as soon as it
was done. "That wasn't right, it was silly, Emma Jane; but I'll tell you
where it might come in--in 'Give me Three Grains of Corn.' You be the

mother, and I'll be the famishing Irish child. For pity's sake put the axe
down; you are not the woodman any longer!" "What'll I do with my
hands, then?" asked Emma Jane. "Whatever you like," Rebecca
answered wearily; "you're just a mother--that's all. What does your
mother do with her hands? Nowhere goes! "'Give me three grains of
corn, mother, Only three grains of corn, It will keep the little life I have
Till the coming of the morn.'"
This sort of thing made Emma Jane nervous and fidgety, but she was
Rebecca's slave and obeyed her lightest commands. At the last pair of
bars the two girls were sometimes met by a detachment of the Simpson
children, who lived in a black house with a red door and a red barn
behind, on the Blueberry Plains road. Rebecca felt an interest in the
Simpsons from the first, because there were so many of them and they
were so patched and darned, just like her own brood at the home farm.
The little schoolhouse with its flagpole on top and its two doors in front,
one for boys and the other for girls, stood on the crest of a hill, with
rolling fields and meadows on one side, a stretch of pine woods on the
other, and the river glinting and sparkling in the distance. It boasted no
attractions within. All was as bare and ugly and uncomfortable as it
well could be, for the villages along the river expended so much money
in repairing and rebuilding bridges that they were obliged to be very
economical in school privileges. The teacher's desk and chair stood on
a platform in one corner; there was an uncouth stove, never blackened
oftener than once a year, a map of the United States, two blackboards, a
ten-quart tin pail of water and long- handled dipper on a corner shelf,
and wooden desks and benches for the scholars, who only numbered
twenty in Rebecca's time. The seats were higher in the back of the room,
and the more advanced and longer-legged pupils sat there, the position
being greatly to be envied, as they were at once nearer to the windows
and farther from the teacher. There were classes of a sort, although
nobody, broadly speaking, studied the same book with anybody else, or
had arrived at the same degree of proficiency in any one branch of
learning. Rebecca in particular was so difficult to classify that Miss
Dearborn at the end of a fortnight gave up the attempt altogether. She
read with Dick Carter and Living Perkins, who were fitting for the
academy; recited arithmetic with lisping little "Thuthan Thimpthon;"

geography with Emma Jane Perkins, and grammar after school hours to
Miss Dearborn alone. Full to the brim as she was of clever thoughts and
quaint fancies, she made at first but a poor hand at composition. The
labor of writing and spelling, with the added difficulties of punctuation
and capitals, interfered sadly with the free expression of