seemed to him as though something was gone out of his life; something
that he would have liked to keep always.

But in the fall Elder Weaver was sufficiently rejuvenated to enter the
field again, and after conference he once more set out on his
peregrinations. For several years thereafter it was true of him as it
is of so many of his kind--he was "just two years in a place, and then
forever moving."

This gave "Dodd" a change of pedagogic administration on an average
once a year; for each village would usually manage to change teachers
on the off years, at least, when they didn't change preachers, and so
keep up the principle of rotation in office, which is so dear to the
average American heart. What a glorious thing the fickle will of the
people is in some of its petty phases!

A change of teacher once a year, however, is not beyond the average of
pupils in this country. I know of schools where the pupils, change
teachers six times a day, every school day in the year, besides now and
then an extra when a principal or a superintendent turns himself loose
on them for an hour or two in a term! Dodd's quota of changes should
not, therefore, be regarded as extravagant; that is, according to some
of the "authorities."

In after years the memory of those four months with Amy Kelly remained
with the boy, an oasis in the trackless Sahara of his school life. In
this dreary expanse now and then a shadow of hope arose, as if to lure
him on, as some new teacher came up over his horizon, but in the main
these all proved delusions, mirages that glittered at phantom
distances, but faded away into empty nothingness as he took a nearer