Читать книгу The Ark of 1803. A Story of Louisiana Purchase Times онлайн

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And Louis Gist had told Jimmy that Marion would not let him go. Jimmy knew why. They were gradually coming to distrust him. He and Kenton and MacAfee were one party in the Fish Creek school; Moses and Lewis and Louis Gist another.

He wanted to go to New Orleans. He was entitled to. All winter long he had planned it. Marion Royce would not dare refuse. But Louis’ unconsidered speech rankled in his bitter heart. He would have been glad to escape into the woods, but he sat sullenly plucking his turkey for the barbecue, entrenched behind his knowledge that he had as much right in the schoolhouse as any of the others who chattered around him.

Free public schools had not yet been established in Ohio, but the pioneer families maintained a “subscription school” for their children in primitive schoolhouses of logs afterwards widely known as “Brush College.” Here masters of greater or less merit taught school six days in a week, with no holidays. Not a few, indeed, of the early schoolmasters of this new region were men whom certain weaknesses of character or appetite had exiled from the older walks of civilization. Except for such infirmities many of them were instructors of remarkable ability.