This was a thing that used to be not very uncommon; but in so
"intelligent" a community as that of Pigwacket Centre, in an era of
public libraries and lyceum-lectures, it was portentous and alarming.

The rebellion began under the ferule of Master Weeks, a slender youth
from a country college, underfed, thin-blooded, sloping-shouldered,
knock-kneed, straight-haired, weak-bearded, pale-eyed, wide-pupilled,
half-colored; a common type enough in in-door races, not rich enough to
pick and choose in their alliances. Nature kills off a good many of this
sort in the first teething-time, a few in later childhood, a good many
again in early adolescence; but every now and then one runs the gauntlet
of her various diseases, or rather forms of one disease, and grows up, as
Master Weeks had done.

It was a very foolish thing for him to try to inflict personal punishment
on such a lusty young fellow as Abner Briggs, Junior, one of the "hardest
customers" in the way of a rough-and-tumble fight that there were
anywhere round. No doubt he had been insolent, but it would have been
better to overlook it. It pains me to report the events which took place
when the master made his rash attempt to maintain his authority. Abner
Briggs, Junior, was a great, hulking fellow, who had been bred to
butchering, but urged by his parents to attend school, in order to learn
the elegant accomplishments of reading and writing, in which he was sadly
deficient. He was in the habit of talking and laughing pretty loud in
school-hours, of throwing wads of paper reduced to a pulp by a natural
and easy process, of occasional insolence and general negligence. One of
the soft, but unpleasant missiles just alluded to flew by the master's
head one morning, and flattened itself against the wall, where it adhered
in the form of a convex mass in alto rilievo. The master looked round
and saw the young butcher's arm in an attitude which pointed to it