CRESSY


By Bret Harte




CRESSY




CHAPTER I.


As the master of the Indian Spring school emerged from the pine woods
into the little clearing before the schoolhouse, he stopped whistling,
put his hat less jauntily on his head, threw away some wild flowers he
had gathered on his way, and otherwise assumed the severe demeanor of
his profession and his mature age--which was at least twenty. Not that
he usually felt this an assumption; it was a firm conviction of his
serious nature that he impressed others, as he did himself, with the
blended austerity and ennui of deep and exhausted experience.

The building which was assigned to him and his flock by the Board of
Education of Tuolumne County, California, had been originally a church.
It still bore a faded odor of sanctity, mingled, however, with a later
and slightly alcoholic breath of political discussion, the result of its
weekly occupation under the authority of the Board as a Tribune for the