all away. Which done, he strode away across the Green Meadow leaving the Meadow Mouse to tuck his cold nose into his paws and wonder what his secret was.
"Do you know what Brother North-wind's secret is?
"Of course you do."
"Oh. Oh." Smoky came to himself. "I'm sorry, Terry, I didn't mean to make you go on and on. Thank you very much." He suppressed a yawn, and the children watched him do so with interest. "Um, now could everybody take out pens and paper and ink, please? Come on, no groaning. It's too nice a day."
The Only Game Going
Mornings it was reading and penmanship, the penmanship taking more time since Smoky taught them (could only teach them) his own Italic hand, which if done right is supremely lovely, and if done even a little wrong is illegible. "Ligature," he would say sternly, tapping a paper, and its frowning maker would begin again. "Ligature," he said to Patty Flowers, who through the whole of that year thought he was saying "Look at you," an accusation she couldn't reply to but couldn't avoid; once in a fit of frustration at this she drove her pen-point through the paper, so fiercely it stuck in the desk like a knife.
Reading was a pickup affair with books from the Drinkwater library, Brother North-wind's Secret and the rest of Doc's tales for the younger and whatever Smoky thought appropriate and informative for the older. Sometimes, bored to tears with their halting voices, he simply read to them himself. He enjoyed that, and enjoyed explicating the hard parts and imagining aloud why the author had said what he had. Most of the kids thought these glosses were part of the text, and when they were grown, the few who read to themselves the books Smoky had read to them sometimes found them lean, allusive and tightlipped, as though parts were missing.
Afternoons was math, which often enough became an extension of penmanship, since the elegant shapes of Italic numbers interested Smoky as much as their relations. There were two or three of his students who were good at figures, perhaps prodigies Smoky thought because they were in fact quicker at fractions and other hard stuff than he was; he would get them to help teach the others. On the ancient principle that music and mathematics are sisters, he sometimes used the anyway somnolent and useless butt-end of the day to play to them on his violin; and its mild, not always certain songs, and the stove's smell, and the winter foregathering outside, were what Billy Bush later remembered of arithmetic.
He had one great virtue as a teacher; he didn't really understand children, didn't enjoy their childishness, was baffled and shy before their mad energy. He treated them like grown-ups, because it was the only way he knew of treating anyone; when they didn't respond like grown-ups, he ignored it and tried again. What he cared about was what he taught, the black ribbon of meaning that was writing, the bundles of words and the boxes of grammar it tied up, the notions of writers and the neat regularity of number. And so that was what he talked about. It was the only game going during school hours—even the cleverest kids found it hard to get him to play any other—and so when they had all stopped listening at last (it happened soonest on fine days, as when snow came tumbling hypnotically out of the sky or when sun and mud came together) he just let them go, unable to think of any way to amuse them further.
And went home himself then through the front gate of Edgewood (the schoolhouse was the old gatehouse, a gray Doric temple with ftr some reason a grand rack of antlers over the door) wondering whether Sophie had got up from her nap yet.
The One Good Thing About Winter
He lingered on this day to clean out the smaller stove; it would need lighting tomorrow, if the cold kept up. When he had locked the door he turned from the tiny temple and stood in the leaf-littered road that ran between it and the front gate of Edgewood. This road hadn't been the one he had taken to reach Edgewood at first, nor this the gate he had gone in at. In fact no one ever used the front gate any more, and the sedge-drowned drive that led for half a mile through the Park was now only kept a path by his diurnal journeys,