Tommy Tregennis. Mary Elizabeth Phillips
without a pause!
The naughtiest girl in the school was Lizzie Wraggles. Lizzie sat on the window seat. She was only four and looked very shy, but Miss Lavinia said she was naughty and uncontrolled. It was always in the reading-lesson that difficulties arose for Lizzie would not read properly.
Tommy’s Ladies had left Draeth on a Saturday, and it was on the Monday morning following that Lizzie was naughtier and more uncontrolled than she had ever been before. On the Friday she had learned, after saying it many times over, that S-O spelled so. This morning, in reading a column of letters and little words, she had pronounced T-O as tow.
“Too,” corrected Miss Lavinia.
“S-O, so; T-O, tow,” murmured Lizzie in a low, sing-song voice.
The squeaking of slate pencils ceased, and all the older children stopped doing sums to listen.
Miss Lavinia became agitated: “Say T-O, tow, Lizzie,” she ordered sternly, and Lizzie said “T-O, tow.”
Miss Lavinia flushed deeply: “I made a mistake,” she explained. “T-O, too.”
“Tow,” whispered Lizzie.
Then Miss Lavinia stood up and slapped her! It was a real slap on her bare arm; a slap that was heard by every child in the room. The school held its breath.
Lizzie Wraggles looked straight into Miss Lavinia’s eyes, dropped her slate, and “Tow” she said, in quite a loud voice.
Miss Lavinia picked up both Lizzie and the slate, and with a shake put them on a hassock in the corner. Miss Lavinia was thoroughly perturbed. “There you must sit,” she said, “and write T-O fifty times before you go home to dinner.”
The children had no proper play-time because there was no place in which they could really play. But at half-past ten, while Miss Lavinia did one or two odd jobs in the kitchen, they sat anywhere in the school-room, and those who had brought lunch with them ate it then. Miss Lavinia stayed away from the room longer than usual this morning. The encounter with Lizzie Wraggles had upset her altogether. Never before had she either slapped or shaken a child, and she could have cried with vexation.
When she returned to the school-room the chairs and tables were pushed on one side so that the middle of the floor was left clear for a game. Then they all joined hands in a ring and played “Luby Loo.”
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