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Master Hempstead’s foible was the all too common one of a fond and apparently ungovernable liking for beverages which inebriate. On a number of occasions he had dismissed school in the middle of the forenoon, and after touching homilies to his pupils, had walked out and not been seen again for several days. He had then reappeared, visibly the “worse for wear.”

Marietta, then a vigorous young colony of farmers and shipwrights from New England, was the Mecca to which Master Hempstead’s erratic pilgrimages were directed; and it was from one of these, after an absence of four days, that he was returning, in no very pleasant humor, on the morning of our story.

In the meantime his little kingdom had run riot and tasted the sweets of self-government. An exuberant hilarity indeed was in the air during these first years of the century just past. Moreover, Ohio had become a state that month, and daring schemes for capturing New Orleans from the Spanish were on foot.

On every day of Master Hempstead’s absence his pupils, numbering nineteen, of various ages, had assembled, in expectation of his reappearance. They played “gool,” “I spy” and “hide-and-seek” in the underbrush about the stumpy clearing. Of more interest still was a trap for wild turkeys which the boys had constructed at a distance in the woods.