Her glance, bent on some small wretch who was misbehaving, had a
peculiarly significant force. The little ones all seemed to love her and
to stand rather in awe of her, too.
Entering the school-room in the morning, she discovered a network of
strings, which one Lemuel Biddy had artfully laid between the desks,
intending thereby to waylay and prostrate his human victim, and stooping
down, she boxed the miscreant, not cruelly but effectively, on the ears.
I was surprised to see that the boy seemed to regard this infliction as
the simple and natural award of justice, bowed his head and wept
penitently, and was subdued for some time afterward.
To me, whose earliest years had been guided and illuminated on the
principle that reason and persuasion alone are to be used in the training
of the tender twig, this little occurrence afforded food for serious
wonder and reflection. I doubted if the logic of the sages or the wooing
of the celestial seraphim would have wrought with such convincing power
on the mind and ears of Lemuel Biddy.
If Rebecca perchance, after painfully protracted exertions, succeeded in
working out some simple problem in arithmetic, her slate containing the
solution was freely handed about among her unaspiring comrades; so that I
judged her to be "weakly generous" as well as "plodding,"--qualities not
of a high order, I esteemed, yet by no means insuperable barriers to
friendship when found to enter more or less largely into the composition
of one's friends.
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