The Mornin'-Glory Girl

								

advised Betty serenely.
A liberal application of shoe paste furnished the unfortunate victim
with a startling pair of jet-black eyebrows, nearly an inch in depth.
Appalled at what he saw, Moses drew from his pocket a grimy
handkerchief. Dampening one corner of it in his mouth, the most
expeditious thing to do under the circumstances, he carefully wiped
around the outside of these funereal bands, reducing them slightly in
size but also straightening their edges.
“Moses! Betty! Time fer school!” called Mrs. Wopp. Betty, satisfied
that after Moses’ frenzied ministrations she was quite presentable,
hastened into the house. Moses fled into the yard where he became very
active splitting wood, his guilty conscience adding efficiency to his
arm.
“Land o’ Goshen, child,” shrieked Mrs. Wopp throwing up her hands in
dismay, “whatever hev you been doin’ to yerself. You look jist like a
wooden Injin. I wouldn’t of knowed you ef I’d met you in the streets
of Judear.”
Nell Gordon, ready for school, came into the kitchen and catching
sight of Betty was seized with such uncontrollable mirth that she fled
upstairs again.
“Come here Betty, till I clean yer face. Where is that boy Moses? I
know he had a hand in this. Drat him anyhow,” said the incensed Mrs.
Wopp.
“Moses didn’t want to clip me Mar, but I thought ’twould be a
’provement to hev nice white eyebrows.” As Betty spoke one large tear
rolled slowly down her cheek moistening in its course a small drop of
blacking which Moses had overlooked in his cleansing operations,
adding still more to the child’s grotesque appearance.
“White eyebrows child! What are you talkin’ about? Yer eyebrows are
blacker nor that stove.”
Betty, feeling that further explanations were worse than useless,
submitted to be led to the sink where her energetic foster-mother
subjected her to so many soapy treatments that in a few minutes time
she emerged very red in the face but purified.
As Mrs. Wopp stood watching her family and the new teacher climb the
hill on their way to school, she remarked to herself, “That boy jist
naterly takes to mischief same as a gopher takes to my green peas.”

CHAPTER III.
A DAY AT SCHOOL.

In the front seat of the Wallace school sat Mannel Rodd. Nell Gordon
declared that he was the roundest object she had ever seen in human
form. Though he had arrived at the mature age of five, he still
retained that cherubic appearance which one sees in the paintings of
old masters. His eyes were as round as the rather sparsely-located
buttons on his shirt. His nose was a small round knob. When he opened
his little round mouth to lubricate a squeaky slate pencil or perhaps
to enunciate some such interesting statement as this, “The cat is on
the mat,” he disclosed a row of pearly little teeth. Indeed his whole
face would have been as round as the moon, were it not that his chin
took an unexpected little saucer-like curve in the very middle of it.