A locust--"a dry-weather fly," the people thereabouts called it--had perched on the sill of the sunniest window, and sang shrilly. But for his chirp the room was very still until two men pushed back the door and strolled up the aisle. Their steps started up queer echoes, like whispers and titters, that chased one another from one corner to another; the locust stopped singing.
"Mrs. Duncombe sent a couple of women over yesterday to sweep and scrub," said the elder of the men. "It all looks fairly decent, I think."
He seated himself upon the teacher's desk, swinging one leg over a corner of it, the other foot upon the floor, and looked around the room, a smile half-humorous, half-pensive showing his white teeth and lighting up his eyes. He had a noble face; his age may have been fifty; his hair was iron-gray. As from the force of early habit he had pulled off his hat at the door, and now held it in his left hand, while with his right he tapped his boot with his riding-whip. This was Major Duncombe, of Greenfield, a fine specimen of the Virginia planter of 1840.
"All the learning I carried with me to college was flogged into me here," he went on, musingly. "Old Byars Lowton reigned supreme from this desk then. I have heard my father say that when Byars applied for the place, Colonel Barton, of Hurley, my nearest neighbor, said to him, 'Young gentleman, you are young and inexperienced. We should like to know something of your proposed principles of government. How do you mean to manage your school?' 'By switch and suasion, sir,' said Byars; '_specially switch_.' The speech got him a berth he held for forty years, and in all that time his hand never lost its cunning"--laughing good-humoredly.
His companion had thrown himself into the wooden arm-chair, and while listening to the Major made good use of his eyes in scrutinizing room and contents. He smiled at the concluding sentence, a smile that curved his mouth upward and drew his brows together, deepening a crease which was always between them. "We shall not disagree there, I reckon," he said. "Martinet practice in the school-room is the wisest in the long-run."
He had a way of jerking out his words that agreed with the impression his face and frown made upon a girl who sat upon the floor in a far corner of the room, with a book upon her knees. She had made a nook for herself by setting one bench upon the top of another, and, herself unseen in the shadow, surveyed the two men through the space left between the benches. She knew one well, and the other was undoubtedly the new teacher who was to take charge of the school the next Monday. Her father had said the day before that he was at Greenfield. He had been in college with young Mr. Duncombe, and the families were old friends.