So we took our readers and went up front We stood up in the

Last updated: 4/24/2023

So we took our readers and went up front We stood up in the usual line and opened to the lesson It was the story of Pluto and Persephone It was new and hard to the class in general and Mr Calhoun was very uncomfortable as the readers stumbled along spelling out words with their lips and in mumbling undertones before they exposed them experimentally to the teacher s ears Then it came to me I was fifth or sixth down the line The story was not new to me because I had read my reader through from lid to lid the first week that Papa had bought it for me That is how it was that my eyes were not in the book working out the paragraph which I knew would be mine by counting the children ahead of me I was observing our visitors who held a book between them following the lesson They had shiny hair mostly brownish One had a looping gold chain around her neck The other one was dressed all over in black and white with a pretty finger ring on her left hand But the thing that held my eyes were their fingers They were long and thin and very white except up near the tips There they were baby pink I had never seen such hands It was a fascinating discovery for me I wondered how they felt I would have given those hands more attention but the child before me was almost through My turn next so I got on my mark bringing my eyes back to the book and made sure of my place Some of the stories I had re read several times and this Greco Roman myth was one of my favorites I was exalted by it and that is the way I read my paragraph Yes Jupiter had seen her Persephone He had seen the maiden picking flowers in the field He had seen the chariot of the dark monarch pause by the maiden s side He had seen him when he seized