Tom had tried to remove the smut of
the steamboat engine-room from his face with his handkerchief;
but as his sister told him, his martial appearance
in the uniform of the Seven Oaks cadets was rather
spoiled by “a smootchy face.” There
wasn’t time then, however, to make any toilet
before the train left. They were off on the short
run to Seven Oaks in a very few minutes after leaving
the Lanawaxa.
Tom was very much excited now.
He craned his head out of the car window to catch
the first glimpse of the red brick barracks and dome
of the gymnasium, which were the two most prominent
buildings belonging to the Academy. Finally
the hill on which the school buildings stood flashed
into view. They occupied the summit of the knoll,
while the seven great oaks, standing in a sort of
druidical circle, dotted the smooth, sloping lawn
that descended to the railroad cut.
“Oh, how ugly!” cried
Helen, who had never seen the place before. “I
do hope that Briarwood Hall will be prettier than that,
or I shall want to run back home the very first week.”
Her brother smiled in a most superior way.
“That’s just like a girl,”
he said. “Wanting a school to look pretty!
Pshaw! I want to see a jolly crowd of fellows,
that’s what I want. I hope I’ll
get in with a good crowd. I know Gil Wentworth,
who came here last year, and he says he’ll put
me in with a nice bunch. That’s what I’m
looking forward to.”
The train was slowing down.
There was a handsome brick station and a long platform.
This was crowded with boys, all in military garb like
Tom’s own. They looked so very trim and
handsome that Helen and Ruth were quite excited.
There were boys ranging from little fellows of ten,
in knickerbockers, to big chaps whose mustaches were
sprouting on their upper lips.
“Oh, dear me!” gasped
Ruth. “See what a crowd we have got to
go through. All those boys!”
“That’s all right,”
Tom said, gruffly. “I’ll see you
to the stage. There it stands yonder and
a jolly old scarecrow of a carriage it is, too!”
He was evidently feeling somewhat
flurried himself. He was going to meet more
than half the great school informally right there at
the station. They had gathered to meet and greet
“freshmen.”
But the car in which our friends rode
stopped well along the platform and very near the
spot where the old, brown, battered, and dust-covered
stage coach, drawn by two great, bony horses, stood
in the fall sunshine. Most of the Academy boys
were at the other end of the platform.
Gil Wentworth, Tom’s friend,
had given young Cameron several pointers as to his
attitude on arrival at the Seven Oaks station.
He had been advised to wear the school uniform (he
had passed the entrance examinations two months before)
so as to be less noticeable in the crowd.
Very soon a slow and dirge-like chant
arose from the cadets gathered on the station platform.
From the rear cars of the train had stepped several
boys in citizen’s garb, some with parents or
guardians and some alone, and all burdened with more
or less baggage and a doubtful air that proclaimed
them immediately “new boys.” The
hymn of greeting rose in mournful cadence:
“Freshie! Freshie! How-de-do!
We’re all waiting here for you.
Hold your head up!
Square each shoulder!
Thrust your chest out!
Do look bolder!
Mamma’s precious papa’s
man
Keep the tears back if you can.
Sob! Sob! Sob!
It’s an awful job
Freshie’s leaving home and mo-o-ther!”
The mournful wailing of that last
word cannot be expressed by mere type. There
were other verses, too, and as the new boys filed off
into the path leading up to the Academy with their
bags and other encumbrances, the uniformed boys, en
masse, got into step behind them and tramped up
the hill, singing this dreadful dirge. The unfortunate
new arrivals had to listen to the chant all the way
up the hill. If they ran to get away from the
crowd, it only made them look the more ridiculous;
the only sensible way was to endure it with a grin.
Tom grinned widely himself, for he
had certainly been overlooked. Or, he thought
so until he had placed the two girls safely in the
big omnibus, had kissed Helen good-bye, and shaken
hands with Ruth. But the girls, looking out
of the open door of the coach, saw him descend from
the step into the midst of a group of solemn-faced
boys who had only held back out of politeness to the
girls whom Tom escorted.
Helen and Ruth, stifling their amusement,
heard and saw poor Tom put through a much more severe
examination than the other boys, for the very reason
that he had come dressed in his uniform. He was
forced to endure a searching inquiry regarding his
upbringing and private affairs, right within the delighted
hearing of the wickedly giggling girls. And
then a tall fellow started to put him through the manual
of arms.
Poor Tom was all at sea in that, and
the youth, with gravity, declared that he was insulting
the uniform by his ignorance and caused him to remove
his coat and turn it inside out; and so Helen and Ruth
saw him marched away with his stern escort, in a most
ridiculous red flannel garment (the lining of the
coat) which made him conspicuous from every barrack
window and, indeed, from every part of the academy
hill.
“Oh, dear me!” sighed
Helen, wiping her eyes and almost sobbing after her
laughter. “And Tommy thought he would escape
any form of hazing! He wasn’t so cute as
he thought he was.”
But Ruth suddenly became serious.
“Suppose we are greeted in any such way at
Briarwood?” she exclaimed. “I believe
some girls are horrid. They have hazing in some
girls’ schools, I’ve read. Of course,
it won’t hurt us, Helen ”
“It’ll be just fun, I
think!” cried the enthusiastic Helen and then
she stopped with an explosive “Oh!”
There was being helped into the coach
by the roughly dressed and bewhiskered driver, the
little, doll-like, foreign woman whom they thought
had been left behind at Portageton.
“There ye air, Ma’mzell!”
this old fellow said. “An’ here’s
yer bag an’ yer umbrella an’
yer parcel. All there, be ye? Wal, wal,
wal! So I got two more gals fer Briarwood;
hev I?”
He was a jovial, rough old fellow,
with a wind-blown face and beard and hair enough to
make his head look to be as big as a bushel basket.
He was dressed in a long, faded “duster”
over his other nondescript garments, and his battered
hat was after the shape of those worn by Grand Army
men. He limped, too, and was slow in his movements
and deliberate in his speech.
“I s’pose ye be
goin’ ter Briarwood, gals?” he added, curiously.
“Yes,” replied Ruth.
“Where’s yer baggage?” he asked.
“We only have our bags.
Our trunks have gone by the way of Lumberton,”
explained Ruth.
“Ah! Well! All right!”
grunted the driver, and started to shut the door.
Then he glanced from Ruth and Helen to the little
foreign lady. “I leave ye in good hands,”
he said, with a hoarse chuckle. “This here
lady is one o’ yer teachers, Ma’mzell Picolet.”
He pronounced the little lady’s name quite
as outlandishly as he did “mademoiselle.”
It sounded like “Pickle-yet” on his tongue.
“That will do, M’sieur
Dolliver,” said the little lady, rather tartly.
“I may venture to introduce myself is
it not?”
She did not raise her veil.
She spoke English with scarcely any accent.
Occasionally she arranged her phrases in an oddly foreign
way; but her pronunciation could not be criticised.
Old Dolliver, the stage driver, grinned broadly as
he closed the door.
“Ye allus make me feel
like a Frenchman myself, when ye say ‘moosher,’
Ma’mzell,” he chuckled.
“You are going to Briarwood
Hall, then, my young ladies?” said Miss Picolet.
“Yes, Ma’am,” said Ruth, shyly.
“I shall be your teacher in
the French language perhaps in deportment
and the graces of life,” the little lady said,
pleasantly. “You will both enter into
advanced classes, I hope?”
Helen, after all, was more shy than
Ruth with strangers. When she became acquainted
she gained confidence rapidly. But now Ruth answered
again for both:
“I was ready to enter the Cheslow
High School; Helen is as far advanced as I am in all
studies, Miss Picolet.”
“Good!” returned the teacher.
“We shall get on famously with such bright
girls,” and she nodded several times.
But she was not really companionable.
She never raised her veil. And she only talked
with the girls by fits and starts. There were
long spaces of time when she sat huddled in the corner
of her seat, with her face turned from them, and never
said a word.
But the nearer the rumbling old stagecoach
approached the promised land of Briarwood Hall the
more excited Ruth and Helen became. They gazed
out of the open windows of the coach doors and thought
the country through which they traveled ever so pretty.
Occasionally old Dolliver would lean out from his
seat, twist himself around in a most impossible attitude
so as to see into the coach, and bawl out to the two
girls some announcement of the historical or other
interest of the localities they passed.
Suddenly, as they surmounted a long
ridge and came out upon the more open summit, they
espied a bridle path making down the slope, through
an open grove and across uncultivated fields beyond a
vast blueberry pasture. Up this path a girl
was coming. She swung her hat by its strings
in her hand and commenced to run up the hill when she
spied the coach.
She was a thin, wiry, long-limbed
girl. She swung her hat excitedly and although
the girls in the coach could not hear her, they knew
that she shouted to Old Dolliver. He pulled
up, braking the lumbering wheels grumblingly.
The newcomer’s sharp, freckled face grew plainer
to the interested gaze of Ruth and Helen as she came
out of the shadow of the trees into the sunlight of
the dusty highway.
“Got any Infants, Dolliver?”
the girl asked, breathlessly.
“Two on ’em, Miss Cox,” replied
the stage driver.
“Then I’m in time. Of course, nobody’s
met ’em?”
“Hist! Ma’mzell’s in there,”
whispered Dolliver, hoarsely.
“Oh! She!” exclaimed
Miss Cox, with plain scorn of the French teacher.
“That’s all right, Dolliver. I’ll
get in. Ten cents, mind you, from here to Briarwood.
That’s enough.”
“All right, Miss Cox.
Ye allus was a sharp one,” chuckled Dolliver,
as the sharp-faced girl jerked open the nearest door
of the coach and stared in, blinking, out of the sunlight.