boys. In any degree I do not for an instant excuse it, and in excess it
must be simply intolerable by better-regulated minds.

But really, boys who are pickles should be put into jars with sound
stoppers, like other pickles, and I wonder that mothers and cooks do not
get pots like those that held the forty thieves, and do it.

I fancy it was because we happened to be in this rough, defiant,
mischievous mood, just about the time that Mrs. Wood opened her school,
that we did not particularly like our school-mistress. If I had been
fifteen years older, I should soon have got beyond the first impression
created by her severe dress, close widow's cap and straight grey hair,
and have discovered that the outline of her face was absolutely
beautiful, and I might possibly have detected, what most people failed
to detect, that an odd unpleasing effect, caused by the contrast between
her general style, and an occasional lightness and rapidity and grace of
movement in her slender figure, came from the fact that she was much
younger than she looked and affected to be. The impression I did receive
of her appearance I communicated to my mother in far from respectful
pantomime.

"Well, love, and what do you think of Mrs. Wood?" said she.

"I think," chanted I, in that high brassy pitch of voice which Jem and I
had adopted for this bravado period of our existence--"I think she's
like our old white hen that turned up its eyes and died of the pip.
Lack-a-daisy-dee! Lack-a-daisy-dee!"

And I twisted my body about, and strolled up and down the room with a
supposed travesty of Mrs. Wood's movements.