The hot May sun was shining in at the smoky small-paned windows; sometimes an outside shutter swung to with a creak, and eclipsed the glare.  The narrow door stood wide open, to the left as you faced the desk, and an old spotted dog lay asleep on the step, and looked wise and old enough to have gone to school with several generations of children.  It was half past three o’clock in the afternoon, and the primer class, settled into the apathy of after-recess fatigue, presented a straggling front, as they stood listlessly on the floor.  As for the big boys and girls, they also were longing to be at liberty, but the pretty teacher, Miss Marilla Hender, seemed quite as energetic as when school was begun in the morning.

The spring breeze blew in at the open door, and even fluttered the primer leaves, but the back of the room felt hot and close, as if it were midsummer.  The children in the class read their lessons in those high-keyed, droning voices which older teachers learn to associate with faint powers of perception.  Only one or two of them had an awakened human look in their eyes, such as Matthew Arnold delighted himself in finding so often in the school-children of France.  Most of these poor little students were as inadequate, at that weary moment, to the pursuit of letters as if they had been woolly spring lambs on a sunny hillside.  The teacher corrected and admonished with great patience, glancing now and then toward points of danger and insurrection, whence came a suspicious buzz of whispering from behind a desk-lid or a pair of widespread large geographies.  Now and then a toiling child would rise and come down the aisle, with his forefinger firm upon a puzzling word as if it were an unclassified insect.  It was a lovely beckoning day out-of-doors.  The children felt like captives; there was something that provoked rebellion in the droning voices, the buzzing of an early wild bee against the sunlit pane, and even in the stuffy familiar odor of the place,—­the odor of apples and crumbs of doughnuts and gingerbread in the dinner pails on the high entry nails, and of all the little gowns and trousers that had brushed through junipers and young pines on their way to school.

The bee left his prisoning pane at last, and came over to the Mayflowers, which were in full bloom, although the season was very late, and deep in the woods there were still some graybacked snowdrifts, speckled with bits of bark and moss from the trees above.

“Come, come, Ezra!” urged the young teacher, rapping her desk sharply.  “Stop watchin’ that common bee!  You know well enough what those letters spell.  You won’t learn to read at this rate until you are a grown man.  Mind your book, now; you ought to remember who went to this school when he was a little boy.  You’ve heard folks tell about the Honorable Joseph K. Laneway?  He used to be in primer just as you are now, and ’t wasn’t long before he was out of it, either, and was called the smartest boy in school.  He’s got to be a general and a Senator, and one of the richest men out West.  You don’t seem to have the least mite of ambition to-day, any of you!”