126 THE LIFE OF PHILIP HENRY GOSSE. 



upon the highest bar, the knees near the chin, the head 

 pressing against the wall so as now and then to push the 

 chair a few inches from it, the hands (but not of the 

 ladies) engaged in fashioning with a pocket-knife a piece 

 of pine-wood into some uncouth and fantastic form." 



He was not, however, to spend his time lolling and 

 whittling on the verandah of Dallas. The neighbouring 

 village of Mount Pleasant was chosen as the site of his 

 school, and lodgings were found for him in the house of a 

 planter, a Mr. Bohanan, in the hamlet itself. It was a 

 rough frame-house, standing in the middle of a large 

 yard, which, with the combined screaming of stark-naked 

 little black children at play, the squealing of pigs, the 

 gobbling of turkeys, the quacking of Muscovy ducks, and 

 the cackling of guinea-fowls, was scarcely an abode of 

 peace. It possessed a splendid example of that flowering 

 tree of the South, the Pride of China, and a wild cherry, 

 the fruit of which was so tempting that all the noises were 

 not able to scare away from it the persistent attentions of 

 the red-headed woodpeckers. The school-house was a little 

 further off, a couple of miles outside the limits of the village. 

 It was a queer little shanty, built of round, unhewn logs, 

 notched at the ends to receive each other, and the inter- 

 stices filled with clay. There was no window, but as the 

 clay had become dry it had been punched out of several of 

 these spaces, and the light and air admitted. The wooden 

 door stood open night and day. The desks were merely 

 split and unsawn pine boards, unfashioned and unplaned, 

 sloping from the walls and fastened with brackets. The 

 forms were split logs, and the only exceptions to the ex- 

 treme rudeness of all the fittings were a neat desk and 

 decent chair for the schoolmaster. The pupils were as rude 

 as the building. Most of them, he writes, " handle the long 

 rifle with much more ease and dexterity than the goose- 



