Ben strode over to the little white tent that Mary had noticed glimmering in the moonlight the preceding evening, and presently emerged, supporting on his arm a partially paralyzed old man, who might have been Rip Van Winkle in the worst of tempers. His white hair and beard encircled a shrivelled, hawklike face, the mouth was sucked back in a toothless eddy that brought tip of nose and tip of chin into whispering distance, the eyes glittered from behind the overhanging, ragged brows like those of a hungry animal searching through the brush for its prey. “If you’ve done eatin’,” whispered Mrs. Yellett to Miss Carmichael, “you’d better run on. Paw’s langwidge is simply awful when we forget to bring him to meals.” Mary ran on. When, after the lapse of some thirty minutes or so, the stentorian voice of Mrs. Yellett recalled Mary to camp, she found that the tin breakfast service had been washed and returned to the mess-box, the beds had been neatly folded and piled in one of the wagons—in fact, the extremely simple tent-hold, to coin a word, was in absolute order. It was just 6 A.M., and Mrs. Yellett thought it high time to begin school. Mary tried to convey to her that the hour was somewhat unusual, but she seemed to think that for pupils who were beginning their tasks comparatively late in life it would be impossible to start sufficiently early in the morning. So at this young and tender hour, with many misgivings, Mary set about preparing her _al fresco_ class-room. She chose a nice, flat little piece of the United States, situated in the shade of the clump of willows that bordered a trickling creek not far from her sylvan bath-room of the early morning. How she was to sit on the ground all day and yet preserve a properly pedagogical demeanor was the first question to be settled. That there was nothing even remotely resembling a chair in camp she felt reasonably assured, as “paw” was sitting on an inverted soap-box under a pine-tree, and “paw,” by reason of age and infirmity, appropriated all luxuries. Mrs. Yellett, with her usual acumen, grasped the situation. “I’m figgerin’,” she commented, “that there must be easier ways of governin’ than sittin’ up like a prairie-dog while you’re at it.”