Only three grains of corn,
It will keep the little life I have
Till the coming of the morn.'"

This sort of thing made Emma Jane nervous and fidgety, but she
was Rebecca's slave and obeyed her lightest commands.
At the last pair of bars the two girls were sometimes met by a
detachment of the Simpson children, who lived in a black house
with a red door and a red barn behind, on the Blueberry Plains
road. Rebecca felt an interest in the Simpsons from the first,
because there were so many of them and they were so patched and
darned, just like her own brood at the home farm.
The little schoolhouse with its flagpole on top and its two doors
in front, one for boys and the other for girls, stood on the
crest of a hill, with rolling fields and meadows on one side, a
stretch of pine woods on the other, and the river glinting and
sparkling in the distance. It boasted no attractions within. All
was as bare and ugly and uncomfortable as it well could be, for
the villages along the river expended so much money in repairing
and rebuilding bridges that they were obliged to be very
economical in school privileges. The teacher's desk and chair
stood on a platform in one corner; there was an uncouth stove,
never blackened oftener than once a year, a map of the United
States, two blackboards, a ten-quart tin pail of water and long-
handled dipper on a corner shelf, and wooden desks and benches
for the scholars, who only numbered twenty in Rebecca's time.
The seats were higher in the back of the room, and the more
advanced and longer-legged pupils sat there, the position being
greatly to be envied, as they were at once nearer to the windows
and farther from the teacher.