Jem wanted Dill to know once and for all that he wasn't scared of
anything: "It's just that I can't think of a way to make him come out
without him gettin' us." Besides, Jem had his little sister to think of.

	When he said that, I knew he was afraid. Jem had his little sister
to think of the time I dared him to jump off the top of the house: "If I
got killed, what'd become of you?" he asked. Then he jumped, landed
unhurt, and his sense of responsibility left him until confronted by the
Radley Place.

				   * * *

        Jem condescended to take me to school the first day, a job usually
done by one's parents, but Atticus had said Jem would be delighted to show
me where my room was. I think some money changed hands in this
transaction, for as we trotted around the corner past the Radley Place I
heard an unfamiliar jingle in Jem's pockets. When we slowed to a walk at
the edge of the schoolyard, Jem was careful to explain that during school
hours I was not to bother him, I was not to approach him with requests to
enact a chapter of Tarzan and the Ant Men, to embarrass him with
references to his private life, or tag along behind him at recess and
noon. I was to stick with the first grade and he would stick with the
fifth. In short, I was to leave him alone.

	"You mean we can't play any more?" I asked.

	"We'll do like we always do at home," he said, "but you'll see-
school's different."

	It certainly was. Before the first morning was over, Miss Caroline
Fisher, our teacher, hauled me up to the front of the room and patted the
palm of my hand with a ruler, then made me stand in the corner until noon.

	Miss Caroline was no more than twenty-one. She had bright auburn
hair, pink cheeks, and wore crimson fingernail polish. She also wore
high-heeled pumps and a red-and-white-striped dress. She looked and
smelled like a peppermint drop. She boarded across the street one door
down from us in Miss Maudie Atkinson's upstairs front room, and when Miss
Maudie introduced us to her, Jem was in a haze for days.

	Miss Caroline printed her name on the blackboard and said, "This
says I am Miss Caroline Fisher. I am from North Alabama, from Winston
County." The class murmured apprehensively, should she prove to harbor her
share of the peculiarities indigenous to that region. (When Alabama
seceded from the Union on January 11, 1861, Winston County seceded from
Alabama, and every child in Maycomb County knew it.) North Alabama was
full of Liquor Interests, Big Mules, steel companies, Republicans,
professors, and other persons of no background.

	Miss Caroline began the day by reading us a story about cats. The
cats had long conversations with one another, they wore cunning little
clothes and lived in a warm house beneath a kitchen stove. By the time
Mrs. Cat called the drugstore for an order of chocolate malted mice the
class was wriggling like a bucketful of catawba worms. Miss Caroline
seemed unaware that the ragged, denim-shirted and floursack-skirted first
grade, most of whom had chopped cotton and fed hogs from the time they
were able to walk, were immune to imaginative literature. Miss Caroline
came to the end of the story and said, "Oh, my, wasn't that nice?"

	Then she went to the blackboard and printed the alphabet in
enormous square capitals, turned to the class and asked, "Does anybody
know what these are?"

	Everybody did; most of the first grade had failed it last year.

	I suppose she chose me because she knew my name; as I read the
alphabet a faint line appeared between her eyebrows, and after making me
read most of My First Reader and the stock-market quotations from The
Mobile Register aloud, she discovered that I was literate and looked at me
with more than faint distaste. Miss Caroline told me to tell my father not
to teach me any more, it would interfere with my reading.

	"Teach me?" I said in surprise. "He hasn't taught me anything,
Miss Caroline. Atticus ain't got time to teach me anything," I added, when
Miss Caroline smiled and shook her head. "Why, he's so tired at night he
just sits in the livingroom and reads."

	"If he didn't teach you, who did?" Miss Caroline asked
good-naturedly. "Somebody did. You weren't born reading The Mobile
Register."

	"Jem says I was. He read in a book where I was a Bullfinch instead
of a Finch. Jem says my name's really Jean Louise Bullfinch, that I got
swapped when I was born and I'm really a-"

	Miss Caroline apparently thought I was lying. "Let's not let our
imaginations run away with us, dear," she said. "Now you tell your father
not to teach you any more. It's best to begin reading with a fresh mind.
You tell him I'll take over from here and try to undo the damage-"

	"Ma'am?"

	"Your father does not know how to teach. You can have a seat now."

	I mumbled that I was sorry and retired meditating upon my crime. I
never deliberately learned to read, but somehow I had been wallowing
illicitly in the daily papers. In the long hours of church- was it then I
learned? I could not remember not being able to read hymns. Now that I was
compelled to think about it, reading was something that just came to me,
as learning to fasten the seat of my union suit without looking around, or
achieving two bows from a snarl of shoelaces. I could not remember when
the lines above Atticus's moving finger separated into words, but I had
stared at them all the evenings in my memory, listening to the news of the
day, Bills to Be Enacted into Laws, the diaries of Lorenzo Dow- anything
Atticus happened to be reading when I crawled into his lap every night.
Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love
breathing.

				   * * *

        "Atticus, that's bad," I said. In Maycomb County, hunting out of
season was a misdemeanor at law, a capital felony in the eyes of the
populace.

	"It's against the law, all right," said my father, "and it's
certainly bad, but when a man spends his relief checks on green whiskey
his children have a way of crying from hunger pains. I don't know of any
landowner around here who begrudges those children any game their father
can hit."

	"Mr. Ewell shouldn't do that-"

	"Of course he shouldn't, but he'll never change his ways. Are you
going to take out your disapproval on his children?"

	"No sir," I murmured, and made a final stand: "But if I keep on
goin' to school, we can't ever read any more...."

	"That's really bothering you, isn't it?"

	"Yes sir."

	When Atticus looked down at me I saw the expression on his face
that always made me expect something. "Do you know what a compromise is?"
he asked.

	"Bending the law?"

	"No, an agreement reached by mutual concessions. It works this
way," he said. "If you'll concede the necessity of going to school, we'll
go on reading every night just as we always have. Is it a bargain?"

	"Yes sir!"

	"We'll consider it sealed without the usual formality,"  Atticus
said, when he saw me preparing to spit.

	As I opened the front screen door Atticus said, "By the way,
Scout, you'd better not say anything at school about our agreement."

	"Why not?"

	"I'm afraid our activities would be received with considerable
disapprobation by the more learned authorities."

	Jem and I were accustomed to our father's last-will-and-testament
diction, and we were at all times free to interrupt Atticus for a
translation when it was beyond our understanding.

	"Huh, sir?"

	"I never went to school," he said, "but I have a feeling that if
you tell Miss Caroline we read every night she'll get after me, and I
wouldn't want her after me."

                                   * * *

	"I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the
idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know
you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it
through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do."

				   * * *

	"That's because you can't hold something in your mind but a
little while,' said Jem. 'It's different with grown folks, we-' His
maddening superiority was unbearable these days. He did not want to do
anything but read and go off by himself."

				   * * *

	``Jack! When a child asks you something, answer him, for goodness'
sake. But don't make a production of it. Children are children, but they
can spot an evasion quicker than adults, and evasion simply muddles 'em''.

				   * * *

	``Atticus -'' said Jem bleakly. 

        ``How could they do it, how could they?''

        ``I don't know, but they did it. They've done it before and they
did it tonight and they'll do it again and when they do it - seems that
only children weep. Good night.''

				   * * *


	``Scout, I think I'm beginning to understand something. I think
I'm beginning to understand why Boo Radley's stayed shut up in the house
all this time. It's because he wants to stay inside.''

				   * * *

	``Naw, Jem, I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks.''

				   * * *
         
	Mr. Tate stopped pacing. He stopped in front of Atticus, and his
back was to us. "I'm not a very good man, sir, but I am sheriff of Maycomb
County. Lived in this town all my life an' I'm goin' on forty-three years
old. Know everything that's happened here since before I was born. There's
a black boy dead for no reason, and the man responsible for it's dead. Let
the dead bury the dead this time, Mr. Finch. Let the dead bury the dead.''

	Mr. Tate went to the swing and picked up his hat. It was lying
beside Atticus. Mr. Tate pushed back his hair and put his hat on.

	`` I never heard tell that it's against the law for a citizen to
do his utmost to prevent a crime from being committed, which is exactly
what he did, but maybe you'll say it's my duty to tell the town all about
it and not hush it up. Know what'd happen then? All the ladies in Maycomb
includin' my wife'd be knocking on his door bringing angel food cakes. To
my way of thinkin', Mr. Finch, taking the one man who's done you and this
town a great service an' draggin' him with his shy ways into the
limelight- to me, that's a sin. It's a sin and I'm not about to have it on
my head.  If it was any other man, it'd be different. But not this man,
Mr. Finch.''

	Mr. Tate was trying to dig a hole in the floor with the toe of his
boot. He pulled his nose, then he massaged his left arm.

	``I may not be much, Mr. Finch, but I'm still sheriff of Maycomb
County and Bob Ewell fell on his knife. Good night, sir.''

				   * * *

	Atticus sat looking at the floor for a long time.

	Finally he raised his head. ``Scout,'' he said, ``Mr. Ewell fell 
on his knife. Can you possibly understand?''

	Atticus looked like he needed cheering up. I ran to him and hugged
him and kissed him with all my might. ``Yes sir, I understand,'' I 
reassured him. ``Mr. Tate was right.''

	Atticus disengaged himself and looked at me. ``What do  
you mean?''

	``Well, it'd be sort of like shootin' a mockingbird,
wouldn't it?''

				   * * * 

	Neighbours bring food with death and flowers with sickness and
little things in between. Boo was our neighbour. He gave us two soap
dolls, a broken watch and chain, a pair of good-luck pennies, and our
lives. But neighbors give in return. We never put back into the tree what
we took out of it: we had given him nothing, and it made me sad.

                                   * * *