She was so hurt and excited because her canine friend was so disliked
that she did not even cry one tear! The teacher, remaining well out of
reach of the dog, repeated her command.
“Take that dog straight home, and don’t let him get in this schoolhouse
again! I will not allow the other children to be so frightened.”
So Carolyn May’s schooldays at The Corners did not begin very happily,
after all. She had always loved and been loved by every teacher she had
ever had before. But Miss Minnie seemed prejudiced against her because
of Prince.
The little girl felt bad about this, but she was of too cheerful a
temperament to droop for long under the pressure of any trouble. The
other children liked her, and Carolyn May found plenty of playmates. She
would never loiter with them, however, in the schoolyard at noon or
after school. Instead, she would hurry home and release poor Prince from
duress.
It had been found impossible to keep the dog on a chain. He had almost
choked himself once, and again had torn his ears getting his collar off.
So the strong chicken coop under the big tree in the back yard which had
first been his prison was again his cell while his little mistress was
at school.
“Of course,” Carolyn May said to Aunty Rose, “we mustn’t let poor
Princey know it’s because of Miss Minnie that he has to be shut up. He
might take a dislike to her, just as she has to him; and that would be
dreadful! If she’d only let him, I know he’d lie down right outside the
schoolroom door while I was inside, and be just as good!”
But Miss Minnie remained obdurate. She did not like any dogs, and in her
eyes Prince was especially objectionable.
One of the bigger girls made up a rhyme about Carolyn May and Prince,
which began:
“_Car’lyn May had a mongrel dog,
Its coat was not white like snow;
And everywhere that Car’lyn went
That dog was sure to go._
“_It followed her to school one day,
Which made Miss Minnie sore;
But when Car’lyn tied the mongrel up,
It was bound to bark and roar._”
There were many more verses; the big girl was always adding new ones.
“I don’t mind it—much,” Carolyn May confessed to Aunty Rose, “but I
wouldn’t like Prince to hear that poetry. His feelings might be hurt.”
It was on the last Friday in the month that something happened which
quite changed Miss Minnie’s attitude towards “that mongrel.”
Incidentally, The Corners, as a community, was fully awakened from its
lethargy, and, as it chanced, like the Sleeping Beauty and all her
retinue, by a Prince.
The school session on Friday afternoons was always shortened. This day
Mr. Brady, one of the school trustees, came to review the school and,
before he left, to pay Miss Minnie her salary for the month.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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