sinner as you have been deserves all this and more too.

Then, there was Mr. Sharp, who kept green and growing the shoots that
Mr. Sliman had sprouted. "Attendance" was Mr. Sharp's hobby. He kept
a blackboard in the front hall of his school house, where it would be
the first thing any one would see when he came into the building, and
on this he scored the record of attendance every day.

There was no harm in that, I am sure; but then, this teacher used to
keep the clock a little slower than town time, and besides, be had a
way of ringing bells and bells at morning and at noon, and of not
counting as tardy any one who got into the building any time before the
ringing of the last bell, which really did not go off until some
minutes after it should have done; and then there was the back way of
written excuses, by which a fellow could sneak up in the rear and rub
out a mark that really stood against him, and not have it count on the
board down in the hall; and absences of a certain character were not
counted either. So, take it all in all, "Dodd" saw clearly that the
shown record and the real record were not the same things by a long
way, but that it was the former on which Mr. Sharp relied for his power
and glory with the patrons of the school, and before the board of
education. So it was that Mr. Sharp watered what Mr. Sliman planted,
and "Dodd" had to stand it all.

And then there was Miss Slack, and Miss Trotter, and Mr. Skimpole (a
lineal descendant of the urbane Harold), and Mr. Looseley, and Mr.
Rattler, and Striker, and Bluffer, and Smiley; all these took a hand at
the mill that was rolling out the character of "Dodd" Weaver, and there
are marks of their varied crankings upon him to this day.