Page:Tea, a poem.pdf/15

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exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleves, feet that might have served for shovels, and his whole frame most loosely hung together. His head was small and flat at top, with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose, so that it looked like a weathercock, perched upon his spindle neck, to tell which way the wind blew. To see him striding along the profile of a hill on a windy day, with his clothes bagging and fluttering about him, one might have mistaken him for the genius of famine descending upon the earth, or some scarecrow eloped from a cornfield.

His school-room was a low building of of one large room, rudely constructed of logs; the windows partly glazed, and partly patched with leaves of old copy books. It was most ingeniously secured at vacant hours, by a withe twisted in the handle of the door, and stakes set against the window shutters; so that though a thief might get in with perfect case, he would find some embarrassment in getting out; an idea most probably borrowed by the architect, Yost Van Houten from the mystry of an eel-pot. The school-