Annals of our ancestors; one hundred and fifty years of history in the ...

ISO ANNALS OF OUR ANCESTORS
hand and lead us to our places. She was a fine, large woman
and was called a good teacher. I was much embarrassed and
hardly dared look up. The teacher untied my Httle pink bonnet
and placed it on a peg, and I showed her my primer. She
told me to spell the words and pronounce them aloud.
Brother Will was quick and bright and manly and not
afraid, so he was soon a favorite. The schools in those times
were just emerging from the earlier forms known to our father
as the age of "lickin' and larnin'." Our first school was a
subscription school, but it was not taught by a man as was
usually the case. Miss Perkins was a good, kind woman and
did not terrify the little ones. She led me on, little and timid
as I was, until I too could read out of the blue-backed spellingbook.
How long ago it all was, and the happenings of the
months that followed are all but lost in the mists of years; it
is almost strange that out of the gray shadows still peer the
little pink sunbonnet and the mud wasps gathering the road-
side clay.
The most of our teachers were young men. I recall one
of these, Sam Tomlinson, called "Tumbleson" by the unlettered
and the disrespectful. After his departure from our school,
his time was designated by some of the big girls as "when Sam
Tumbleson teached school here." I remember the spring
morning he came walking in to ask mother if she would send
her four children to a school he was about to teach in our
district. The exact sum he specified for each I have forgotten,
but I hardly think it could have exceeded fifty cents apiece.
Mother gave him our names, and he began to teach us in hot
weather. The summers in southern Ohio seem semitropical,
and that was a burning season. The yellow clay dust in the
big road would get almost too hot for our bare feet, so we would
pick our way along the weeds and dog fennel which bordered
the roads. The dusty, pungent smell of fennel — what pictures
it can call to memory!
Sam was a good young man. "Get your Testaments!"
was his morning order, and for the opening exercises we read
aloud a verse around from the New Testament. One of his
sisters had taught our school some years before, and she con-