The schoolmistress had no friends in that strange village and did not go out much. She worked very hard and told herself she was not lonely, no not lonely at all. "The life of the mind is crowded with the company of ideas," she said to herself.

During the day, she taught and read and wrote about what she read. In the evenings, she studied magic. The schoolmistress was a hobbyist and no witch; she was working from a mail-order magic book just to pass the time. She was terrible at spells, and most of her potions were failures, though she did succeed in bringing a porcelain cat to life by dribbling a free sample of Anima-lixir onto its head. The clay-colored cat howled constantly, tore up the furniture, and at night it left dead mice and bats on the carpet for her to find in the morning. She tried to turn it back into a figurine, but could never get the Anima-lixir antidote to come out right.

One night, flipping through the mail-order magic book for a recipe to try, the schoolmistress discovered a potion for enchanting blackboards. This interested the schoolmistress. Lately she had felt that her classes were lacking. Her pupils were slow and grudging; they did not like to read or write or debate. She had tried everything she could think of to wake them up, including--she hated to admit it--baking them brownies and inviting them to attend class at her cottage for a change of scene. But nothing availed. Day after day, they grew more inert and sleepy, and day after day she found herself tapdancing more and more rapidly, first to try to get their attention, and finally just to fill the silence that would hang heavily over them all if she did not. An enchanted blackboard could be just the thing, she reasoned. It was true that she had not been making good use of the blackboard that covered one wall of the classroom. She read on.

An enchanted blackboard, the mail-order magic book informed her, was a blackboard that could transmit the words written on it to other, similarly enchanted blackboards. To enchant a blackboard, you needed the help of a wizard with special expertise in magicommunications. Enchanting blackboards was not a job for a novice, the book warned. But once enchanted, anyone, even a clumsy amateur like the schoolmistress herself, could use it. Once enchanted, anything she wrote on the blackboard would become immediately available to her pupils, who could read it by consulting their similarly enchanted home blackboards and who could post responses simply by writing over her words with their own. "I must find a wizard at once," cried the schoolmistress, and ran out into the night to look for one.

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