Bull Shows Up in Yard of One-Room Schoolhouse

It was my first year of teaching and it was in a one-room country schoolhouse, located down the lane of a farm where in one of the grazing fields the farmer occasionally had cattle.

As I was a town-raised girl, I was apprehensive of the cattle but was assured that there would be no cattle in the field during school hours. I accepted this, but with much misgiving in my mind.

Each morning as I went down the lane, I carefully looked around the field before scurrying up to the schoolhouse. Only once in awhile would I see a few cattle down in the far corner grazing contentedly; paying no attention to me so I timidly but quickly got to the school and inside giving a sigh of relief.

We always had our recess outside, weather permitting, but this one morning one of the boys came to me and said, "Teacher, I don't think we had better go outside for recess today."

"Why not?" I asked, and Jim said, "Well, my Dad's bull is out in the field." I immediately agreed that we shouldn't go out but stay in and play some indoor games instead for a change.

Naturally the inevitable happened, nature called and one of the boys asked permission to leave the room. We looked out the window but didn't see our friend, so I agreed, but cautioned him to look carefully and if he saw him to not take any chances and run back inside.

Jim started around the side of our building and so did the bull. Both started for the school door and Jim got there in time for us to close and fasten the door. There were two doors on the full length porch which were only fastened with a latch and quite unstable from long usage, so we began to pile desks in front of each door as we could hear our friend prancing and bellowing back and forth out on that porch, just as our boy was prancing very uncomfortably inside, back and forth.