CHAPTER VII

"WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT ..."


The public school to which the Marshall children went as soon as they
were old enough was like any one of ten thousand public schools--a
large, square, many-windowed, extravagantly ugly building, once red
brick, but long ago darkened almost to black by soft-coal smoke. About
it, shaded by three or four big cottonwood-trees, was an inclosed
space of perhaps two acres of ground, beaten perfectly smooth by
hundreds of trampling little feet, a hard, bare earthen floor, so
entirely subdued to its fate that even in the long summer vacation no
spear of grass could penetrate its crust to remind it that it was made
of common stuff with fields and meadows.

School began at nine o'clock in the morning and, as a rule,
three-fourths of the children had passed through the front gate twenty
or thirty minutes earlier. Nobody knew why it should be considered
such a hideous crime to be "tardy," but the fact was that not the most
reckless and insubordinate of the older boys cared to risk it. Any
one of the four hundred children in any public school in the city
preferred infinitely to be absent a day than to have the ghastly
experience of walking through deserted streets (that is, with no
children on them), across the empty playground frighteningly unlike
itself, into the long, desolate halls which, walk as cat-like as one
might, resounded to the guilty footsteps with accusing echoes. And