Of a hook and link and it’s called a fid. And the crack-brained critter--what do you think? Why, he stuck his thumb in the unhooked link! The school house was more than filled that evening. People came straggling up across the fields by short cuts, following lanterns that winked between the striding legs of the bearers. The nearer neighbours scuffled slowly along the road, bringing lamps and shielding the blaze with curved palms as they walked. The lanterns were hung on the nails about the cracked walls, part of whose unsightliness the little teacher had covered with the evergreen wreaths that she had plaited. The lamps were placed on the knife-whittled desks. The grown-ups painfully bent their knees under these narrow confines, some of them acting as though they were astonished that they were so much larger than they were in the old school days. Most of them hadn’t been in the school house since they had gone out with their tattered books in a strap so many years before. “It makes ye feel nearer the grave, don’t it?” whispered Salome Burpee to her seat mate of the old days, who had by almost unconscious choice sought the well-remembered desk. The seat mate, a tall, scrawny woman, was obliged to sit sidewise, for she couldn’t get her knees under the desk. “My, yes!” she replied rather mournfully. “It don’t seem hardly a day ago that I could sit here and swing my feet.” “That’s my initial,” mumbled Deacon Burgess to Uncle Paul Appleby, fingering a deep nick in the edge of the desk. “They was new then, and I got walloped for cutting it.” The men had gravitated to one side of the room, the women to the other. All whispered decorously if they had occasion to address one another, for in rural communities the usual gatherings are prayer meetings, and habit is strong. They discussed the report that the Squire had gone to the teacher’s boarding place with her, and would be present at the meeting that evening, and that he had talked “real saucy” to Mrs. Dunham, and that, too, after she had hired him for her lawyer. Esther sat grimly at the far side of the room in the girls’ reservation, and Micajah was hunched into a seat on the other side, his eyes staring straight before him. Neither exchanged a word with any other person in the room.