Ella, a little schoolgirl of the sixties; a book for children and for grown-ups who remember

Front matter

ELLA®

BY EVA MARCH TAPPAN

ELLA

Contents

I. A Little Girl and a Big Seminary

II. A Young Lady of the English and Classi¬ cal Graduating Course

III. The Three Tragedies of Ella’s Seminary Life

Chapter I

The nicest thing that ever happened to a little girl eight years old was going to happen to Ella, and she was so delighted that she could hardly sit still in the big clumsy stage-coach that rolled and shook and swung slowly away from the city. Uphill and down¬ hill it went, past ponds and meadows and brooks and woods, and little new houses and big old homesteads shaded by ancient elms or maples. Every roll of the wheels brought the little passenger nearer to perfect happiness.

Ella was going to live in a seminary, and surely nothing could be more charming than that. She knew all about seminaries, for she had visited one when she was little — at least two years before. The girls had petted her and given her candy; the principal had presented her with a story-book. Best of all, she had slept in an old-fashioned bed with a canopy, such a bed as she had never seen anywhere else. What could be more delightful! And now she was going to have every day such pleasures as these, and no one knew how much more marvelous ones.

ELLA

By and by the stage came to a scattered village with a church or two, a schoolhouse, and a post-office. After the mail had been left, the driver turned up a long avenue with fields and a line of trees on either hand. At the head of the avenue was a circle of tall fir trees, and back of the circle was a large white build¬ ing with a wing at each end, a narrow piazza in front, and tall fluted columns rising from its floor to the top of the second story.

The driver called “ Whoa! ” A tall man came from somewhere and shook hands with Ella’s mother and with herself. Then he led the way upstairs to some bare, almost unfurnished rooms. The mother was to use the furniture from her old home, and it had not

i

yet arrived. After a little talk, they all went down some dark and winding stairs to the dining-room, a large, low, gloomy basement room with two long tables. The end of one of them was “set,” and there Ella and her mother and the tall man and two or three other grown-ups ate supper.

A little later Ella and her mother went up to the almost unfurnished rooms. Ella stood looking through the open door down the lonely corridor. There were no nice girls about; there was no canopy to the bed; there were no story-books; there was no one to talk to her. Everybody was grown up; there were no chil¬ dren. There were no city lights, and the twilight seemed to be shutting down faster than it ever did before.

Oh, this doesn’t seem one bit, not one single bit, like a seminary,” Ella cried.

The mother gathered her into her lap, and there the little girl sobbed away her loneliness and disappoint¬ ment, and forgot it all in sleep. But the mother sat beside the window, looking out into the darkness and the past; for it was here that she and the father had first met, in the old joyful student days; and now he was gone, and she had come back, alone, to teach students who were, as she had then been, at the happy beginnings.

When the morning came, things were better, Ella thought. The sun shone, and people began to gather. The first arrivals were teachers and boy and girl stu¬ dents. Then came students of earlier days, for the seminary had been closed for some years and was now to be reopened. There were people from the village and the neighboring country, and a little later, when the stage from the city drove up, there were a number of dignified middle-aged men with long beards. These men were to make speeches.

The mother was helping to welcome the guests, and Ella wandered around alone. Before long she met a boy a little smaller than herself. The two children looked at each other.

“What’s your name?” the boy asked.

“Ella. What’s yours?”

“John. My father’s the principal. What did you have Christmas?”

ELLA

“I had a doll and a bedstead for her and a book of fairy stories,” the little girl replied. “What did you have?”

“I had a sled and a rubber ball and some red mittens.”

“I had a sled three Christmases ago, when I was little,” said Ella. “Its name is Thomas Jefferson. How old are you?”

“Six. But I’m going on seven,” he added quickly.

Ella was eight, going on nine, and she thought that a boy who was only six was hardly more than a baby; but he was better than nobody, so they spent most of the day together.

It was a full day. The hundreds of people went through the building; they ate a collation in the base¬ ment dining-room; they renewed old friendships; and at two o’clock they assembled in the little grove front¬ ing the main door to listen to the speeches.

And speeches there were, indeed; speeches on the old days of the seminary and on the plans for its fu¬ ture; and of course there was one on “The true theory of education,” delivered by the man who knew least about that subject. The lieutenant-governor of the State sent a check for $100 for the library; the mayor of the capital of the State sent one for $250. Ticknor & Fields, Little & Brown, and Wendell Phillips all presented books. Everybody was jubilant, and sunset was only one hour distant when with three hearty cheers for the seminary the people said good-bye to one another, and all but the teachers and the students started for their homes.

Ella had not heard any of the speeches, but she had found where early goldenrod and asters were growing; she had learned that there was a beautiful lake whose shore was a fine place to pick up pebbles and go in wading; and she had discovered on the hastily ar¬ ranged shelves of the library some books that looked interesting. She and John had only one grievance, namely, that the watermelon had given out before it came to their end of the table.

The next day classes were arranged and the regular life of the seminary began. Ella was delighted to find that she was to be called a “student” just as if she had been grown up, and when a young man, already lonesome for the little sister at home, asked her to sit on his knee, she refused. It was of course quite proper for a little girl to sit on the knee of an elderly gentleman, as he seemed to her, but she did not think that one “student” ought to sit on the knee of another.

Ella’s mother had her own “theory of education.” She thought that it was better for young children to be out of doors than in a schoolroom, and that, when they began to study, arithmetic and foreign languages should come first. Ella had never been to school or been taught at home. Somehow, she had learned to read, no one knew exactly how, and she had read every book that had come to hand if it looked at all

ELLA interesting. One of these books was a small arith¬ metic. It was quite the fashion in those days to bind schoolbooks in paper of a bright salmon pink. Ella liked the color, and the result was that she had picked up some familiarity with addition, subtraction, multi¬ plication, and division.

The professor of mathematics was a courteous, scholarly young man just out of college. He said that it would not trouble him in the least to have in one of his classes a little girl in a short-sleeved, low-necked blue muslin dress and “ankle-ties.” Apparently the tall young men and young women students did not ob¬ ject either; and the result was that for half an hour ev¬ ery morning Ella made groups of straggling figures on the blackboard, and with the kindly teaching of “my professor,” as she proudly called the young instructor, she learned to “invert the divisor and proceed as in multiplication.” She learned also that a decimal point has an uncanny power to reduce a comfortable num¬ ber of dollars to mere copper cents. She even learned that “If a student purchased a Latin grammar for $0.75, a Virgil for $3.75, a Greek lexicon for $4.75, a Homer for $1.25, an English dictionary for $3.75, and a Greek Testament for $0.75,” the whole cost of his purchases would amount to $15. This was her favorite among the “Practical Problems.” The teacher never

i

guessed the reason, but it was because she had read a story about a carrier pigeon, and she was glad that the student had a “homer.”

Ella learned that “cwt.” meant hundredweight , that “d” meant penny , and that a queer sign some¬ what like a written “L” meant pound. Why these things should be, she had no idea; she supposed grown people had just made them up. She could overlook even such foolishness as this, but she did draw the line at learning the multiplication table. It was in her book, and she could turn to it at any time, so why should she bother to learn it? The young professor was always charitable to a new idea. He looked at the child thoughtfully; maybe she was in the right. At any rate, he only smiled when he saw how rapidly a certain page in her arithmetic was wearing out. Be¬ fore it had quite disappeared, the multiplication table, even with the eights and nines, was as firmly fixed in the small pupil’s memory as if she had learned it with tears and lamentations.

Ella spelled rather unusually well, perhaps because in all her eight years she had seldom seen or heard a word spelled incorrectly; but her handwriting was about as bad as it could be, especially toward the end of the page, where the “loops and tails” pointed as many ways as if they had been an explosion of fire¬ works. The tall principal, John’s father, taught pen¬ manship, and the little girl, with a copybook, a red-painted penholder, and a viciously sharp “Gillott, 303,” took her place at one of the long, slanting tables in the hall. It was much too high for her, but no one was troubled about that in those days. If a table was

ELLA too high, it was because the child was too short, and that was all there was to it.

Day after day, Ella wrote in her copybook whole pages of such thrilling statements as, “Be good and you will be happy,” and, “Honesty is the best pol¬ icy.” Of the truth of the first she was by no means convinced, for she remembered being — of necessity — very well behaved, indeed, when she was not at all happy. As to the second, she had no idea what “policy” was. She asked the principal very shyly what the sentence meant, and he said it meant that little boys and girls must always tell the truth. Of course no decent children ever told lies, thought Ella, with a vague indignation. She pondered over the reply, and at length made up her mind that the writing-book must have been printed for children that were ragged and dirty and said “ain’t got none.” She had to finish the page, but every line was worse written than the one before it. The prin¬ cipal looked a little grave and asked if she was sure that she had done her best. Ella hung her head and said nothing; but maybe she had done her best — under the circumstances.

The principal tried his utmost to teach her to write the fine “Spencerian ” hand that was then so admired; but the wicked little “Gillott, 303,” continued to stick in the paper and make sprays of ink all about — which Ella rather admired as incipient pictures — and the red-painted wooden penholder still aimed at whatever point of the compass happened to suit the comfort of the little cramped fingers. “Where should the pen point?” the principal would patiently ask; and with equal patience the pupil would reply, “Over the right shoulder.” It would turn into place obedi¬ ently, but long before the teacher had reached the other end of the long table, it was again pointing out the north window toward the lake or out the south window to the hill and the rocks. And why not? Where the thoughts were, surely the pen might point also.

Ella felt as if she was quite a busy little girl, for be¬ sides her lessons in arithmetic and penmanship, there was half an hour of French every day. It was good strong old-fashioned French, too, learned by main force from a grammar. She recited patiently, “Ah, bay, say, day,” etc., as she was taught; but in her heart of hearts she thought it utter foolishness to spoil perfectly good English letters by giving them such names. She learned that there were such things as nasal sounds, objected to in English, but highly es¬ teemed in French; and she learned to translate into the French language and pronounce — with an accent that would have thrown the politest Frenchman into a state of collapse — such interesting dialogue as, “Have you the girl’s glove?” “No, sir, but I have the cook’s hat”; and such bits of tragedy as, “My brother’s tailor has broken my slate,” or — most touching of all — “I liked the little girl, but she did not like me.” '

ELLA

French, even grammar French, carried Ella into a new world. She concluded that to harmonize with its caprices she ought to take a French name when, so to speak, she entered France by way of Fasquelle’s Grammar and the French recitation room. Some¬ where she had heard the word “elephantine,” and she had read, in English, about Fantine and Cosette. She concluded that this fine-sounding word — only she would spell it “Elefantine” and put on plenty of ac¬ cents, circumflexes, because she thought acutes and graves had an unfinished look — would accord nicely with her own name and would also be a compliment to the French, especially if it was pronounced with a good strong nasal sound in the middle of the word.

She was rather too shy to ask the French teacher to call her “Elefantine,” but she wrote the name in her Fasquelle, and had fine times saying it over to herself when she was alone. One day the mother happened to take up the book, and she showed Ella in the diction¬ ary what the word meant. All the poetry went out of it then, for Ella always bowed to the authority of the big dictionary; and she promptly rubbed out the new name, accents and all.

Chapter II A Lady Of The English And Classical Graduating Course

A second volume which Ella carried proudly under her arm when she went to the French class was called “Le Grandpere.” It was written expressly for the use of schools — so said the title-page. It was “Approuve par le Conseil Royal de Flnstruction publique.” If further proof was needed of its value, the fact that it was “Carefully prepared for Amer¬ ican schools ” was surely sufficient. How could any¬ thing be better for a child to translate?

“Le Grandpere” began, with unpardonable guile, quite like a story: “The old Captain Granville in¬ habited a pretty village situated on the shore of the Loire,” as Ella slowly translated it. But her sus¬ picions were soon aroused, for, looking ahead a few lines, she found something about “charging himself with overseeing their first education.” That did not sound promising, though it was possible that the four grandsons who were being educated might do interest¬ ing things bet ween times. As she read further, she found that the grandfather educated them by taking them to walk every Sunday and giving them in¬ structive lectures. Now in Ella’s experience nice children did not study their lessons on Sunday, neither

ELLA did they go to walk. It is true that occasionally, after they had been to church and Sunday school, had eaten the cold Sunday dinner, and had read their Sundayschool books through, they were allowed to take a quiet, almost awesome walk up and down the paths of the nearest cemetery and talk about the flowers or their books; but this was quite different from an everyday stroll off into the country.

The four boys and their “Grandpere,” however, wandered off shamelessly every Sunday — in the forenoon, too, when by all the customs of Ella’s Sun¬ day mornings they should have been at church. It was true that occasionally their grandfather gave them a moral lecture on a Sunday morning, but these lectures were often a puzzle to Ella’s eight-year-old theology. For instance, she had, of course, been taught to do what she knew was right, but she was quite at sea when “Jules” confessed that he had struck his brother, and declared, “laying his hand upon his heart,” that “something here” told him he had done wrong. Ella laid her hand over the place where she supposed her heart to lie, but nothing made any re¬ marks to her. She concluded that it was because she was not quite bad enough just then, and she made up her mind that — although of course she would not do anything wrong on purpose — yet the next time that she was naughty, she would watch carefully to see if she heard any conversation in the vicinity of her heart.

A LADY OP THE GRADUATING COURSE 13

*

It was somewhat of a pity that Ella’s lessons made so little impression upon the bulk of “Le Grandpere,” for it was quite an amazing book, and to know it would have been a widely distended, if not a liberal education. It began, indeed, so simply that Ella was disgusted, for these boys, old enough to live in a seminary like herself, actually were amazed when they saw the sun, and appealed to their grandfather to tell them what it was. Ella did not appreciate the exigencies of authorship or realize that there must be something on which to hang a small lecture about the heavenly bodies.

Further on there were discourses on the five senses, on how to count, on the history of the French sover¬ eigns; and then the chapters gradually worked on through slavery, avarice, extravagance, the massacre of Saint Bartholomew’s Day, vaccination, and lep¬ rosy. What could have been better for a child? Any deficiencies that in later times manifested themselves in Ella’s education may be fairly ascribed to her never having completed the translation of this profound volume.

In Ella’s study of French, there was one thing that puzzled her greatly. She was willing to believe that French people understood French, but that they ever really knew it as she knew English without studying Fasquelle and “Le Grandpere” was something that she could hardly accept as truth. Then, too, the mother had told her that she had had a great-great-

ELLA grandfather who was a Frenchman; and she often wondered whether, if she had lived in his day, they would have been able to talk together. She could have said, “Have you the knife of the brother of the carpen ter?” but unless he made the proper reply, “No, but I have the pencil of the sister of the dressmaker,” she would not have known what to say next. She could never have said, “ Great-great-grandfather, will you take me to ride this afternoon?” because that was not in Fasquelle.

She wondered if the French people really talked French every day, or only when they had company. After long deliberation, she came to the conclusion that they probably talked French all the time, but that of course they thought in English. These were the grown-ups. As for the children, no one could expect them to talk French, certainly not when they were playing. She wished she had one of them to play with. It would be almost like meeting her great-great¬ grandfather as a little boy.

Of course Ella “practiced.” In the sixties, boys “took lessons” only if they showed some talent for music, but girls were expected, talent or no talent, to spend in solitary confinement two hours a day at hard labor on the piano. In Ella’s case, the two hours were lessened to one by her mother’s decree, and “solitary confinement” was not added to the hard labor, be¬ cause, when the sad moment had arrived, a genial “Bow-wow!” was always heard and a big black

A LADY OF THE GRADUATING COURSE 15 shaggy head, followed by the rest of a great New¬ foundland dog, pushed open the door. If it chanced to be the day for Ella’s lesson, Ponto waved a friendly apology to the teacher and withdrew; but on other days he stretched himself out under the piano, and with a sigh of toleration proceeded to sleep away the time until the hour was up. He never failed to hear the first stroke of the bell, and if Ella did not stop on the instant, he slipped his great muzzle under her wrists and lifted them up from the keys.

Ella, like most children, had a healthy dislike of practicing. It was such an unmanageable interference w T ith her plans. “You like French and you like arith¬ metic,” said her puzzled teacher; “ why is it that you do not like music?”

Ella pondered a minute, then she said: “It’s be¬ cause there isn’t any way to get the better of it. If I have arithmetic to do, I can work hard and then I can say, ‘ There, you old thing, I’ve done you in half the time you wanted me to spend, and now Ponto and I are going to the lake in spite of you.’ But no matter how hard I practice, an hour is always an hour, and there isn’t any way to make it shorter.”

Of course Ella hated to count. Bribes were offered. “My music teacher said that if I would count three weeks without stopping, she would give me a piece,” Ella wrote in her little diary. In spite of the promised “piece,” however, “One, two, three, four,” became as tiresome as the multiplication table, and at length

ELLA she invented a way to make the time pass; she played very loud with one hand and at the same time patted Ponto with the other.

She felt a little guilty when her music teacher said: “I heard you practicing two or three measures over and over this morning, Ella, and I thought what a good lesson you were going to have to-morrow.”

Ella did not reply, and she forgot to listen to see whether her heart would make any speeches to her. She didn’t like practicing, and she didn’t, and when she heard of remarkable little girls no older than she who had taken only twelve lessons and could play “two pieces” already, she did not care very much that she could play only one. Neither did Ponto.

Ella had a reason for not caring. She firmly ex¬ pected that some day, even without that wearisome “One, two, three, four,” she would play as well as the little girl with two pieces, perhaps even as well as her teacher. It was all very simple and very logical. The teacher wore a ring with a bright red stone in it and was able to play; by and by she would have a ring with a bright red stone, and then of course she would be able to play. Ella knew that the grown-ups would laugh at her if she told them her fancy, so she only whispered it into Ponto’s ear. Dogs could understand, but grown-ups could not.

Like most children, Ella was younger than her years in some ways and older in others. She could cherish a belief in the efficacy of a ring to give her musical ability, and she could sit in a class with

A LADY OF THE GRADUATING COURSE 17

“ladies and gentlemen” more than twice her age without a thought of this being anything remarkable. Of course she knew that the children in the village went to school with boys and girls of their own years; but this was nothing; they did one thing and she did another, that was all. She even took it as a matter of course when in the “Institute Reporter,” the little four-page sheet that glorified the seminary with printers’ ink, she saw her own name among the other “ladies.” It had, too, a special mark of honor in the shape of an asterisk indicating that she was “In studies of the English and Classical graduating course.” To be sure, no one of her studies was clas¬ sical, and she was many years removed from gradua¬ tion, but it made one more name on the list.

As to the English, she really wrote with some degree of correctness because she had never seen writings that were incorrect, and she was quite aghast when she first heard the correction of compositions in class. She wrote to her uncle, “I can’t stop for dates. I want to tell you what funny compositions some of the scholars write. One great boy wrote his and com¬ menced every word with a capital letter. I have not quite got to doing that.” Ella thoroughly enjoyed making tiny blankbooks and composing equally tiny stories carefully adjusted to the little pages. She even manufactured a paper for children, composing, edit¬ ing, and copying it all herself.

Every Monday evening the “Lyceum” was held, an exercise which was expected to develop the literary

ELLA ability of the students. Ella had joined it as a matter of course, and when called on for a recitation, she had given “Over the River” in her best style. When the second call came, she decided, possibly with a latent instinct for advertising, to read the first number of her paper. This was not exactly an innovation, for the “Lyceum” already rejoiced in a paper called “The Alpha.”

Ella’s paper was named “Little Pearls.” How the “ladies and gentlemen” and the august faculty kept their faces straight during its presentation is a mys¬ tery. It contained a few conundrums, whose answers were promised “in our next,” but otherwise it was carefully modeled on the weekly paper of the Sunday school. There were letters from children with the patronizing comments of the editor; there was an original story or two; and the sheet ended with the tragic tale, drawn from the little editor’s own ex¬ perience, of a tiny fish, caught and brought home from the lake. I fear that the writer had never been properly trained in “nature study,” for she stated that the fish jumped out of the water and was found “lying upon its back,” dead, and she declared, “although a cat has nine lives, a fish has only one, and therefore it always stayed dead forever after.” Whether this literary production lengthened the list of subscribers, no one can say; but certainly Ella’s minute cash account showed no marked increase of income on that date.

Chapter III The Three Tragedies Of Ella’s Seminary

LIFE

At the seminary there were only three children be¬ sides Ella. One was two-year-old Nellie, the steward’s daughter, whom she loved with all her heart. The second was John, and the third was his little sister, two years younger than he. For this little sister there was rarely any real place in Ella’s world; she was too young for a companion and too old for a baby; but just as Ned, the steward’s son, fifteen years old, would sometimes allow Ella, “going on nine,” to share his amusements, so Ella would oc¬ casionally permit John, “going on seven,” to go to the lake with her to skip stones, or to the hills for wild flowers.

The village children all went to the village school, and Ella seldom saw any of them. The mother had once known the mother of Dora, daughter of the vil¬ lage doctor, and it was arranged that the two children should spend an afternoon together. No one ever found out exactly what happened, but after this day, whenever the two little girls passed, they held their heads very high and swung their short skirts disdain¬ fully, and looked away from each other.

Soon after this visit, it came to pass that Ella

ELLA needed to have a tooth out to make way for a new¬ comer. “I dare you to go to the doctor and have it pulled,” said Ned mischievously. Ella would have felt humiliated not to “take a dare,” and she ap¬ pealed to the mother for permission. The mother was glad to escape the string-and-pull process, and she hoped that if the children met again, they might be¬ come better friends.

“Was Dora there?” she asked on Ella’s return.

“Yes, she was,” replied Ella with emphasis. “Her father told her to go out, but she just stayed in the room every minute. She wanted to hear me cry, but I wouldn’t. When it was out, she said, just as if she was glad, ‘Hm! Hurt you some, didn’t it?’ and I laughed and said, ‘No, not a bit.’” Ella did not add the fact that going down the doctor’s walk, she had swung her skirts with more disdain than ever.

The mother looked amused.