boy in the school, rose at once and snapped insistent fingers; but Johnny Spencer alone was desirous not to attract attention to himself.  The Colburn’s Intellectual Arithmetic with the portrait had been well secreted between his tight jacket and his shirt.  Miss Hender selected a trustworthy freckled person in long trousers, who was half way to the door in an instant, and was heard almost immediately to shout loudly at the quiet horse.

Then the Hero of District Number Four made his acknowledgments to the teacher.  “I fear that I have interrupted you too long,” he said, with pleasing deference.

Marilla replied that it was of no consequence; she hoped he would call again.  She may have spoken primly, but her pretty eyes said everything that her lips forgot.  “My grandmother will want to see you, sir,” she ventured to say.  “I guess you will remember her,—­Mis’ Hender, she that was Abby Harran.  She has often told me how you used to get your lessons out o’ the same book.”

“Abby Harran’s granddaughter?” Mr. Laneway looked at her again with fresh interest.  “Yes, I wish to see her more than any one else.  Tell her that I am coming to see her before I go away, and give her my love.  Thank you, my dear,” as Marilla offered his missing hat.  “Good-by, boys and girls.”  He stopped and looked at them once more from the boys’ entry, and turned again to look back from the very doorstep.

“Good-by, sir,—­good-by,” piped two or three of the young voices; but most of the children only stared, and neither spoke nor moved.

“We will omit the class in Fourth Reader this afternoon.  The class in grammar may recite,” said Miss Hender in her most contained and official manner.

The grammar class sighed like a single pupil, and obeyed.  She was very stern with the grammar class, but every one in school had an inner sense that it was a great day in the history of District Number Four.

II.

The Honorable Mr. Laneway found the outdoor air very fresh and sweet after the closeness of the school-house.  It had just that same odor in his boyhood, and as he escaped he had a delightful sense of playing truant or of having an unexpected holiday.  It was easier to think of himself as a boy, and to slip back into boyish thoughts, than to bear the familiar burden of his manhood.  He climbed the tumble-down stone wall across the road, and went along a narrow path to the spring that bubbled up clear and cold under a great red oak.  How many times he had longed for a drink of that water, and now here it was, and the thirst of that warm spring day was hard to quench!  Again and again he stopped to fill the birchbark dipper which the school-children had made, just as his own comrades made theirs years before.  The oak-tree was dying at the top.  The pine woods beyond had been cut and had grown again since his boyhood, and looked much as he remembered them.  Beyond the