his multiplication table, and he liked to recite it. And he knew all about the calendar and the hymn-book. Most of these things he had known since he was four or five, and what good did they do him?
But in the morning he liked taking Olga by the hand, and leading her out the gate under the big black-walnut trees, and down the street. Mother always kissed them good-bye with such a serious and anxious air that Gilbert felt he was setting out on a genuine mission. At the crossing he would restrain Olga from rushing ahead; then he could carefully look up and down the street to see if there were any horses and wagons coming. Then he would dash across, pulling Olga precipitately behind him. They would go along the upper green, under the great railroad bridge, and come to Miss Waldron's.
To Gilbert the school was an enormous joke. He could not take Miss Waldron seriously. Her tall, bony frame and her sad, fierce eyes touched no springs of affection in him. A lesson or two unlocked all the latent cruelty in him. She was there to teach Gilbert and Olga and the half-dozen other little children who came to the school-room over the kitchen, and she was determined to teach them. She knew that children under seven needed to be taught to read and write and spell and that this was what their parents had sent them to her for. So she gritted her teeth, and came every morning to her hard and bitter work.
But Gilbert by that time had read so many books at home that it seemed absurd that he should be taught to read, and he would rattle through the lesson while the younger children fidgeted and then tried painfully to puzzle it out. Gilbert could spell, too, and he raced through the words, and when he was asked the meaning of words he would say that "retire" meant "go to bed," because he had seen it mean that in a book he had read. And Miss Waldron would say he was a saucy boy, and plead with him to answer nicely. Then he would mimic her, and watch her fight back the temper in her sad, fierce eyes. She would stand him in the corner, with his back to the class, and he would look round and wink at the other children to make them laugh. Miss Waldron's sisters would come up from the kitchen below, where they were baking, and beg Gilbert not to make the teacher so unhappy, and promise him a cookie if he would be good. And Gilbert, drunk with power, would refuse everything, and ride his high horse until the mill-whistles blew twelve o clock and they all went home for the day.
