of this specimen, don't you? Alas! alas! what herds of six-year-old
babies there are thus to be taken care of, many of them coming from
homes where they have never known what care meant, but every one to be
got into shape somehow, by you, my dear school ma'am, or master, all
for a handful of paltry dollars per month, while you wait to get
married, or to enter another profession. "To what base uses do we
return!"

So, on a leaden morning in November, when the mud was deepest and the
first snow was shied through the air, whose sharpness cut like a knife,
"Dodd" Weaver came into the schoolroom alone, his mother being too busy
to go with him. He had waded across the street where the mud and slush
were worse than anywhere else. His boots were smeared to their very
tops, and the new book that he started with had a black daub the size
of your hand on the bright cover. He came late and, without a word of
hesitation, marched to the desk, and remarked to the woman in charge:
"Mam said you was to take care o' me!"




CHAPTER II.

Miss Elvira Stone was teaching the school that year. Miss Stone was
above the average height of women, and carried her social much higher
than she did her physical head, while there was a kind of
nose-in-the-air bearing in both cases. She had beautiful, wavy black
hair, a clear complexion, black eyes, and narrow, thin lips, which were
always slightly pursed up, as the groundwork or main support of a kind
of cast-iron smile that never left her face for a moment while she was