So the fatal spelling-school had to be appointed for the Wednesday of the second week of the session, just when Ralph felt himself master of the situation. Not that he was without his annoyances. One of Ralph's troubles in the week before the spelling-school was that he was loved. The other that he was hated. And while the time between the appointing of the spelling tournament and the actual occurrence of that remarkable event is engaged in elapsing, let me narrate two incidents that made it for Ralph a trying time. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 10: In naming the several parts of the Indian corn and the dishes made from it, the English language was put to many shifts. Such words as _tassel_ and _silk_ were poetically applied to the blossoms; _stalk_, _blade_, and _ear_ were borrowed from other sorts of corn, and the Indian tongues were forced to pay tribute to name the dishes borrowed from the savages. From them we have _hominy_, _pone_, _supawn_, and _succotash_. For other nouns words were borrowed from English provincial dialects. _Shuck_ is one of these. On the northern belt, shucks are the outer covering of nuts; in the middle and southern regions the word is applied to what in New England is called the husks of the corn. _Shuck_, however, is much more widely used than _husk_ in colloquial speech--the farmers in more than half of the United States are hardly acquainted with the word _husk_ as applied to the envelope of the ear. _Husk_, in the Middle States, and in some parts of the South and West, means the bran of the cornmeal, as notably in Davy Crockett's verse: "She sifted the meal, she gimme the hus'; She baked the bread, she gimme the crus'; She b'iled the meat, she gimme the bone; She gimme a kick and sent me home." In parts of Virginia, before the war, the word _husk_ or _hus'_ meant the cob or spike of the corn. "I smack you over wid a cawn-hus'" is a threat I have often heard one negro boy make to another. _Cob_ is provincial English for ear, and I have known "a cob of corn" used in Canada for an ear of Indian corn. While writing this note "a cob of Indian corn "--meaning an ear--appears in the report of an address by a distinguished man at a recent meeting of the Royal Geographical Society. A lady tells me that she met, in the book of an English traveller, the remarkable statement that "the Americans are very fond of the young grain called cob." These Indian-corn words have reached an accepted meaning after a competition. To _shell_ corn, among the earliest settlers of Virginia, meant to take it out of the envelope, which was presumably called the shell. The analogy is with the shelling of pulse.] CHAPTER III. MIRANDY, HANK, AND SHOCKY.