So Miss Polly, chuckling with delight, was lifted from the wagon, while Johnny and Pep pulled off their skates, but she was a little frightened when she felt the slippery ice under her feet, and “hung down like a rag doll,” as Johnny said, instead of putting herself in sliding position.
“Stand up straight, Polly, and put your feet down flat, _so_,” said Johnny, as Polly slid helplessly along on the backs of her heels, resting all her little weight confidingly upon the boys. And, after two or three earnest explanations from Johnny and Pep, she suddenly seemed to understand; she stiffened up, grasped a hand on each side, and went off in such style that the boys had almost to run to keep up with her, and she obeyed her mother’s call very unwillingly.
“Wasn’t it fun to see her little face, though!” said Johnny, as he and Pep walked home, having declined the proffered drive for the sake of a little more skating. “I think she thought something had made her feet slippery, all of a sudden—she’d never been on ice before.”
The thaw came very soon after this, as thaws will come, even when people have new steel skates, but happily, there are always tops and marbles, and, as some wise person has remarked, “When one door shuts, another opens.”
Johnny did not play marbles “for keeps”; his father had explained to him that taking anything without giving a fair return for it is dishonesty, and as he quite understood this, he had no desire to “win” marbles from boys who could not shoot so well as he could, but he enjoyed playing fully as much as anybody did, and found the game exciting enough when played merely for the hope of victory.
It was in the midst of a very even game that the school bell rang one morning. Johnny and one other boy were the champions; the rest had “gone out.” They lingered for one more shot—two more—then just a third to finish the game, and then, as they hurried into the schoolroom, they found that the roll had been called, and they were marked late.
Johnny had intended to take one more look at his history lesson, but there was no time. He was sure of it all, except two or three dates, and of course, one of those dates came to him—or rather, didn’t come; it was the question that came. The next boy gave the answer, and Johnny’s history lesson for the first time that term, was marked “Imperfect.”