Amanda by Anna Balmer Myers (read my book TXT) 📕

Her wish was granted. There was an opening in Crow Hill, in the little rural school in which she had received the rudiments of her education. Amanda applied for the position and was elected.

She brought to that little school several innovations. Her love and knowledge of nature helped her to make the common studies less monotonous and more interesting. A Saturday afternoon nutting party with her pupils afforded a more promising subject for Monday’s original composition than the hackneyed suggestions of the grammar book’s “Tell all you know about the cultivation of coffee.” Later, snow forts in the school-yard impressed the children with the story of Ticonderoga more indelibly than mere reading about it could have done. During her last year at Normal, Amanda had read about a school where geography was taught by the construction of miniature islands, capes, straits, peninsulas, and so forth, in the school-yard. She directed the older children in the formation of such a landscape picture. When a blundering boy slipped and with one bare foot demolished at one stroke the cape, island and bay, there was much merriment and rivalry for the honor of rebuilding. The children were almost unanimous in their affection for the new teacher and approval of her methods of teaching. Most of them ran home with eager tales concerning the wonderful, funny, “nice” ways Miss Reist had of teaching school.

However, Crow Hill is no Eden. Some of the older boys laughed at the “silly ideas” of “that Manda Reist” and disliked the way she taught geography and made the pupils “play in the dirt and build capes and islands and the whole blamed geography business right in the school-yard.”

It naturally followed that adverse criticism grew and grew, like Longfellow’s pumpkin, and many curious visitors came to Crow Hill school. The patrons, taxpayers, directors were concerned and considered it their duty to drop in and observe how things were being run in that school. They found that the three R’s were still taught efficiently, even if they were taught with the aid of chestnuts, autumn leaves and flowers; they were glad to discover that an island, though formed in the school-yard from dirt and water, was still being defined with the old standard definition, “An island is a body of land entirely surrounded by water.”

If any other school had graduated Amanda, her position might have been a trifle precarious, but Millersville Normal School was too well known and universally approved in Lancaster County to admit of any questionable suggestions about its recent graduate. Most of the people who came to inspect came without any antagonistic feeling and they left convinced that, although some of Amanda Reist’s ways were a little different, the scholars seemed to know their lessons and to progress satisfactorily.

Later in the school year she urged the children to bring dried corn husk to school, she brought brightly colored raffia, and taught them how to make baskets. The children were clamorous for more knowledge of basket making. The fascinating task of forming objects of beauty and usefulness from homely corn husk and a few gay threads of raffia was novel to them. Amanda was willing to help the children along the path of manual dexterity and eager to have them see and love the beautiful. Under her guidance they gathered and pressed weeds and grasses and the airy, elusive milkweed down, caught butterflies, and assembled the whole under glass, thus making beautiful trays and pictures.

On the whole it was a wonderful, happy year for the new teacher of the Crow Hill school. When spring came with all the alluring witchery of the Garden Spot it seemed to her she must make every one of her pupils feel the thrill of the song-sparrow’s first note and the matchless loveliness of the anemone.

One day in early April, the last week of school, as she locked the door of the schoolhouse and started down the road to her home an unusual glow of satisfaction beamed on her face.

“Only two more days of school, then the big Spelling Bee to wind it up and then my first year’s teaching will be over! I have enjoyed it but I’m like the children—eager for vacation.”

She hummed gaily as she went along, this nineteen-year-old school teacher so near the end of her first year’s work in the schoolroom. Her eyes roved over the fair panorama of Lancaster County in early spring dress. As she neared the house she saw her Uncle Amos resting under a giant sycamore tree that stood in the front yard.

“Good times,” she called to him.

“Hello, Manda,” he answered. “You’re home early.”

“Early—it’s half-past four. Have you been asleep and lost track of the time?”

He took a big silver watch from a pocket and whistled as he looked at it. “Whew! It is that late! Time for me to get to work again. Your Aunt Rebecca’s here.”

“Dear me! And I felt so happy! Now I’ll get a call-down about something or other. I’m ashamed of myself, Uncle Amos, but I think Aunt Rebecca gets worse as she grows older.”

“‘Fraid so,” the man agreed soberly. “Well, we can’t all be alike. Too bad, now, she don’t take after me, eh, Amanda?”

“It surely is! You’re the nicest man I know!”

“Hold on now,” he said; “next you make me blush. I ain’t used to gettin’ compliments.”

“But I mean it. I don’t see how she can be your sister and Mother’s! I think the fairies must have mixed babies when she was little. I can see many good qualities in her, but there’s no need of her being so contrary and critical. I remember how I used to be half afraid of her when I was little. She tried to make Mother dress me in a plain dress and a Mennonite bonnet, but Mother said she’d dress me like a little girl and if I chose I could wear the plain dress and bonnet when I was old enough to know what it means. Oh, Mother’s wonderful! If I had Aunt Rebecca for a mother—but perhaps she’d be different then. Oh, Uncle Amos, do you remember the howl she raised when we had our house wired for electricity?”

“Glory, yes! She was scared to death to come here for a while.”

“And Phil wickedly suggested we scare her again! But she was afraid of it. She was sure the house would be struck by lightning the first thunder-storm we’d have. And when we put the bath tub into the house— whew! Didn’t she give us lectures then! She has no use for ‘swimmin’ tubs’ to this day. If folks can’t wash clean out of a basin they must be powerful dirty! That’s her opinion.”

Both laughed at the remembrance of the old woman’s words. Then the girl asked, “What did she have to say to you to-day? Did she iron any wrinkles out of you?”

“Oh, I got it a’ready.” The man chuckled. “I was plantin’ potatoes till my back was near broke and I came in to rest a little and get a drink. She told me it’s funny people got to rest so often in these days when they do a little work. She worked in the fields often and she could stand more yet than a lot o’ lazy men. I didn’t answer her but I came out here and got my rest just the same. She ain’t bossin’ her brother Amos yet! But now I got to work faster for this doin’ nothin’ under the tree.”

When Amanda entered the kitchen she found her mother and the visitor cutting carpet rags. Old clothes were falling under the snip of the shears into a peach basket, ready to be sewn together, wound into balls and woven into rag carpet by the local carpet weaver on his hand loom.

“Hello,” said the girl as she laid a few books on the kitchen table.

“Books again,” sniffed Aunt Rebecca. “I wonder now how much money gets spent for books that ain’t necessary.”

“Oh, lots of it,” answered the girl cheerfully.

“Umph, did you buy those?”

“Yes, when I went to Millersville.”

“My goodness, what a lot o’ money goes for such things these days! There’s books about everything, somebody told me. There’s even some wrote about the Pennsylvania Dutch and about that there Stiegel glass some folks make such a fuss about. I don’t see nothin’ in that Stiegel glass to make it so dear. Why, I had a little white glass pitcher, crooked it was, too, and nothin’ extra to look at. But along come one of them anteak men, so they call themselves, the men that buy up old things. Anyhow, he offered to give me a dollar for that little pitcher. Ach, I didn’t care much for it, though it was Jonas’s granny’s still. I sold it to that man quick before he’d change his mind and mebbe only give me fifty cents.”

“You sold it?” asked Amanda. “And was it this shape?”

She made a swift, crude sketch of the well-known Stiegel pitcher shape.

“My goodness, you drawed one just like it! It looked like that.”

“Then, Aunt Rebecca, you gave that man a bargain. That was a real Stiegel pitcher and worth much more than a dollar!”

“My goodness, what did I do now! You mean it was worth more than that?” The woman was incredulous.

“You might have gotten five, perhaps ten, dollars for it in the city. You know Stiegel glass was some of the first to be made in this country, made in Manheim, Pennsylvania, way back in 1760, or some such early date as that. It was crude as to shape, almost all the pieces are a little crooked, but it was wonderfully made in some ways, for it has a ring like a bell, and the loveliest fluting, and some of it is in beautiful blue, green and amethyst. Stiegel glass is rare and valuable so if you have any more hold on to it and I’ll buy it from you.”

“Well, I guess! I wouldn’t leave you pay five dollars for a glass pitcher! But I wish I had that one back. It spites me now I sold it. My goodness, abody can’t watch out enough so you won’t get cheated. Where did you learn so much about that old glass?”

“Oh, I read about it in a book last year,” came the ready answer.

Aunt Rebecca looked at the girl, but Amanda’s face bore so innocent an expression that the woman could not think her guilty of emphasizing the word purposely.

“So,” the visitor said, “they did put something worth in a book once! Well, I guess it’s time you learn something that’ll help you save money. All the books you got to read! And Philip’s still goin’ to school, too. Why don’t he help Amos on the farm instead of runnin’ to Lancaster to school?”

“He wants to be a lawyer,” said Mrs. Reist. “I think still that as long as he has a good head for learnin’ and wants to go to school I should leave him go till he’s satisfied. I think his pop would say so if he was livin’. Not everybody takes to farmin’ and it is awful hard work. Amos works that hard.”

“Poof,” said Aunt Rebecca, “I ain’t heard tell yet of any man workin’ himself to death! It wouldn’t hurt Philip to be a farmer. The trouble is it don’t sound tony enough for the young ones these days. Lawyer— what does he want to be a lawyer for? I heard a’ready that they are all liars. You’re by far too easy!”

“Oh, Aunt Rebecca,” said Amanda, “not all lawyers are liars. Abraham Lincoln was a lawyer.”

“Ach, I guess he was