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“Bring me that slate this instant!” repeated the schoolmistress when Henrietta hesitated, “and don’t you rub out the picture.”

Henrietta’s face took on a sullen look; she rose slowly, dropping the slate with a clatter on her desk, whence it slid with a bang to the floor, without any effort on her part to arrest it. Miss Tucker did not observe–she was nearsighted–that in its fall, and in Henrietta’s picking it up, it was reversed, so that the side presented to the schoolmistress was not the side on which the girl had last been at work. All Miss Tucker saw was that the side which faced her when she took the slate from Henrietta’s hand contained a picture of a little child. It was a chubby little face, with a funny-serious expression. The execution was by no means correct, the foreshortening of the little bare legs was not well done, the hands were out of drawing, and the whole picture had the stillness that comes from inexperience. But Miss Tucker did not see that. All she saw was that it was to her eye a miraculously good picture.

“That’s the way you get your arithmetic lesson! You haven’t done a sum this morning. You spend your time drawing little brats like that.”

“She isn’t a brat.”

“Who isn’t a brat?”

“Periwinkle isn’t. That’s Periwinkle.”

“Who’s Periwinkle?”

“She’s my niece. She’s Jane’s little girl. You sha’n’t call her a brat, neither.”

“Don’t you talk to me that way, you impudent thing! That’s the way you spend your time, drawing pictures.”

Miss Tucker here held the slate up in front of her and stared at the picture of Periwinkle. Whereupon the scholars who were spectators of Miss Tucker’s indignation smiled. Some of them grew red in the face and looked at their companions. Little Charity Jones rattled out a good, hearty, irrepressible giggle, which she succeeded in arresting only by stuffing her apron into her mouth.

“Charity Jones, what are you laughing at?”

But Charity only stuck her head down on the desk and went into another snicker.

“Come here!”

Charity was sober enough now. Miss Tucker got a little switch out of her desk and threatened little Charity with “a good sound whipping” if she didn’t tell what she was laughing at.

“At the picture,” whimpered the child.

“I don’t see anything to laugh at,” said the mistress, holding the slate up before her.

Whereupon the school again showed signs of a sensation.

“What are you laughing at?” and Miss Tucker instinctively felt of her back hair.

“It’s on the other side of the slate,” burst out Charity’s brother, who was determined to deliver his sister out of the den of lions.

Miss Tucker turned the slate over, and there was Henrietta’s masterpiece. It was a stunning caricature of the schoolmistress in the act of yawning. Of course, when that high and mighty authority had, in her indignation held up the slate so as to get a good view of the picture of Periwinkle, she was unconsciously exhibiting to the school the character study on the reverse of the slate. And now, as she looked with unutterable wrath and consternation at the dreadful drawing, the scholars were full of suppressed emotion–half of it terror, and the other half a served-her-right feeling.

“The school is dismissed. Henriettar Newton will stay,” said the schoolmistress. The children arose, glad to escape, while Henrietta felt that her friends were all deserting her, and she was left alone with a wild beast.

“Chaw her all up,” said one of the boys to another. “I wouldn’t be in there with her for a good deal.”

Rob Riley left the room the last of all, and he lingered under the window. But what could he do? After a while he hurried away to Henrietta’s father, on the adjoining farm, and made a statement of the case to him.

“I sha’n’t interfere,” said the old man sternly. “That girl’s give me trouble enough, I’m sure. Spends her time makin’ fool pictures on a slate. I hope the schoolmistress’ll cure her.”