Mr. Jeminy remained in Hillsboro, at
first out of hope, later out of habit. At last it seemed to him as if
Hillsboro were his home. "Where else should I go?" he had asked
himself. "Here is all I have in the world. Here are my only friends.
Well, after all," he said to himself more than once, "I am not wasted
here, exactly." And he tried to comfort himself with this reflection.
He had started out to build a new school in the wilderness. "I shall
teach my pupils something more than plus and minus," he declared. He
remembered a little verse he used to sing in those days:
Laws, manuals,
And texts incline us
To cheat with plus
And rob with minus.
But it had all slipped away, like sand through his fingers. Now he
hoped to find one child to whom he could say what was in his mind.
One by one the brighter boys had drifted off to the county schools,
leaving the little schoolhouse to the dull and to the young. Some were
taken out of classes early, and added, like another pig, to the farms.
Girls, when they were old enough, were kept at home to help their
mothers; after a while they, too, married; then their education was
over.
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