brings the snow,Makes our feet and fingers glow.
February brings the rain,
Thaws the frozen lake again.
March brings breezes, loud and shrill,
To stir the dancing daffodil.
April brings the primrose sweet,
Scatters daisies at our feet.
May brings flocks of pretty lambs
Skipping by their fleecy dams.
June brings tulips, lilies, roses,
Fills the children's hands with posies.
Hot July brings cooling showers,
Apricots and gillyflowers.
August brings the sheaves of corn;
Then the harvest home is borne.
Fresh October brings the pheasant;
Then to gather nuts is pleasant.
Dull November brings the blast;
Then the leaves are whirling fast.
Chill December brings the sleet,
Blazing fire and Christmas treat."
CHAPTER IV
RULES AND RESULTS
The strangest thing about Miss Plympton was that she never was able to tell the Tucker Twins apart. This was an unforgivable offense in their eyes and in the eyes of their friends. They were as alike as two peas in some ways and the antipodes in others. They might mystify you from the back but once you got a good look in their eyes, the mirrors of their souls, you were pretty apt to get them straight and keep them straight. Then their colouring was so different. Dee's hair was black with blue lights and Dum's was black with red lights; Dee's eyes were grey and Dum's hazel; Dee had a dimple in her chin, while Dum's chin had an uncompromising squareness to it that gave you to understand that her character was quite as fixed as Gibraltar, and she had no more idea of changing her mind than Miss Plympton had of toying with unalterable facts, such as 1066 or 1492.
From the very beginning I scented trouble between the new principal and the Tuckers. Miss Plympton called them Miss Tucker indiscriminately, and sometimes both of them answered and sometimes neither of them. Either way irritated Miss Plympton. She seemed to think they should know by instinct which one she meant. She finally grasped the fact that they had separate names but was more than apt to call Dee, Virginia, and Dum, Caroline, which was quite as unpardonable as saying Columbus discovered America in 1066 would have been to her.
"The very next time she calls me Caroline, I'm going to call her Plumpton," declared Dum. "I don't mean that Dee ain't as good as I am and a heap better, but I'm me – "
"Yes, and in the same vernacular Dee's her," I teased. We had a compact to correct the grammar of our roommates.
"I stand corrected about ain't but I still stick to 'I'm me.' It is more forceful and means more than 'I'm I.' Of course I'm I, but in Miss Plumpton's mind there seems to be strong doubt whether I'm me. I is a kind of ladylike, sissy outside of a person, but me is the inmost, inward, soul self – I'm me – me – me!"
"Well, you certainly are and there is no one quite like you. I don't see why Miss Plympton can't see it, too."
"I know why! It's because she doesn't understand people. She thinks of us as being human beings of the female sex, who weigh a certain amount, are just so tall and so wide, have lived a certain time and come from such and such a city. Why, the only difference she sees between you and Mary Flannagan is that you are in 117 and Mary is in 115, and you have brown hair and Mary has red, and Mary is better on dates than you are. The real true Page Allison is a closed book to that fat head. I believe Miss Peyton knew our souls as well as she did our bodies."
We missed Miss Peyton every hour of the day. Her reign had been wise and gentle and always just. We never forgot her kindness to us the time Dee kept the kitten in her room all night. She won us over for life then and there. Miss Plympton had retained all of Miss Peyton's rules and added to them. She fenced us around with so many rules that the honour system was abolished.
Study hall was a very different place from what it had been in Miss Peyton's time. Then order had ruled because we were on our honour not to communicate with one another by word or sign. Of course some girls do not regard honour as a very precious thing and they broke their word, but most girls, I am glad to say, have as keen a sense of honour as the best of men. Miss Plympton's attitude toward us was one of doubt and suspicion and, the honour system being abolished, we naturally felt that the most serious fault we could commit would be breaking the eleventh commandment: "Thou shalt not be found out." We developed astonishing agility in evading the authorities and getting out of scrapes. From having been five law-abiding citizens, we turned into extremely slick outlaws. Even Annie Pore would sometimes suggest escapades that no one would dream could find harbour behind that calm, sweet brow.
The same unrest pervaded the whole school. A day never passed that some group of girls was not called to the office to have a serious reprimand. We got so hardened that it meant no more to us than the ordinary routine of the day, while the year before to be called to the office to have Miss Peyton censure you about something was a calamity that every one earnestly prayed to avoid. Miss Peyton never talked to you like a Dutch Uncle unless you needed it, while Miss Plympton never talked to you any other way.
"She makes me feel like an inmate of a detention home or some place where the criminally insane are sent," stormed Dee. "She makes out I have done things I never even thought of doing and has not got sense enough to know I never lie."
"What was it this time?" I asked.
"She said I changed the record on the Victrola Sunday night from 'Lead, Kindly Light,' sung by Louise Homer, to 'A-Roaming in the Gloaming,' by Harry Lauder. You see all that bunch of preachers was here, and, of course, only sacred music was permissible under the circumstances."
"Why, I did that!" exclaimed Dum, "and didn't the preachers like it, though! Well, I reckon it is up to me to go 'fess up."
"Not a bit of it!" declared Dee. "She never asked who did it – that's not her way. She works with a spy system, so let her work that way. I bet we can outwit any spy she can get."
It seems strange when I look back on it that this spirit of mischief had entered into our crowd to such an extent, but we were not the same girls we had been the year before, all because of this head of the school who did not understand girls. If she had trusted us, we would have been trustworthy, I am sure.
There was a printed list of don'ts a yard long tacked up in every available spot, and I can safely declare that during the year we did every single thing we were told not to do. If we missed one of them it was an accident. They were such silly don'ts. "No food must be kept in the rooms." Now, what school girl is going to keep such a rule as that? "No talking in the halls or corridors." That would be impossible except in a deaf and dumb institution. "No washing of clothes of any sort in the rooms or bath rooms." Then what is the use of having little crêpe de chine handkerchiefs and waists if they must be sent in the laundry and come back starched and all the nice crinkle ironed out of them? Who would put her best silk stockings in wash to have them come back minus a foot? "No ink to be taken to rooms." We would just as soon have written with pencils except that the rule made us long to break it. Of course, break it we did. "No talking after lights are out." Now what nonsense was that? When lights are out is the very time to talk to your roommate. I verily believe that there was not one single rule on that list that was necessary. There were lots more of them and all of them equally silly. The worst one of all
