Through Keziah, the parson gave orders for Master Johns to report himself at once in the school-room. The maid returned presently, clattering down the stairs in a great fright,--
"Gone?" says the tall master, astounded. He represses a wriggle of healthful satisfaction on the part of his pupils by a significant lift of his ferule, then moves ponderously up the stairs for a personal visit to the chamber of the culprit. The maid had given true report; there was no one there. Never had he been met with such barefaced rebellion. Truants, indeed, there had been in days gone by; but that a pupil under discipline should have tied together Mistress Brummem's linen and left it draggling in this way, in the sight of every passer-by, was an affront to his authority which he had not deemed possible.
An hour thereafter, and he had assigned the morning's task to the boys (which he had ventured to lengthen by a third, in view--as he said, with a grim humor--of their extremely cheerful spirits); established Mistress Brummem in temporary charge, and was driving his white-faced nag down the road which led toward Ashfield. The frosted pools crackled under the wheels of the old chaise; the heaving horse wheezed as the stern parson gave his loins a thwack with the slackened reins and urged him down the turnpike which led away through the ill-kept fields, from the rambling, slatternly town. Stone walls that had borne the upheaval of twenty winters reeled beside the way. Broad scars of ochreous earth, from which the turnpike-menders had dug material to patch the wheel-track, showed ooze of yellow mud with honeycombs of ice rimming their edges, and supporting a thin film of sod made up of lichens and the roots of five-fingers. Raw, shapeless stones, and bald, gray rocks, only half unearthed, cumbered the road; while bunches of dwarfed birches, browsed by straying cattle, added to the repulsiveness of the scene. Nor were the inclosed lands scarcely more inviting. Lean shocks of corn that had swayed under the autumn winds stretched at long intervals across fields of thin stubble; a few half-ripened pumpkins, hanging yet to the seared vines,--whose leaves had long since been shrivelled by the frost,--showed their shining green faces on the dank soil. In other fields, overrun with a great shaggy growth of rag-weed, some of the parson's flock--father and blue-nosed boys--were lifting poor crops of "bile-whites" or "merinos." From time to time, a tall house jutted upon the road, with unctuous pig-sty under the lee of the garden-fence and wood-pile sprawling into the highway, where the parson would rein up his nag, and make inquiry after the truant Reuben.