“Where did you get him?” said the Principal. “In the back yard of one of those double-deckers down by the river,” answered the Truant Officer. “Ain’t he the bird!” he added in professional enthusiasm. “I’ve been chasing him for two or three days. He’s just about as easy to handle as an eel, and to-day […]

The heart of the janitor of an East Side school is not commonly supposed to be a tender organ. And yet to Miss Bailey, busy with roll-books and the average attendance of First Readers, there entered the janitor with an air half apologetic, half defiant. There was snow upon the janitor’s cap and little icicles […]

“Miss Bailey,” said Miss Blake, entering Room 18 during the lunch hour of a day in January, shortly after school had recovered from the Christmas holidays, “might I come in for a few moments this afternoon to observe your children? I suppose I shall be having them next term. Too bad you first-grade teachers never […]

“Say! What you think!” cried Rebecca Einstein to her friend and neighbor Esther Nolan. “What you think we got to our house?” Esther confessed ignorance. “A baby,” cried the triumphant Rebecca. “It’s mine,” said Esther promptly. “I writes such a letter on the Central Park Stork he shall bring me a baby. I tells him […]

“Stands a girl by our block,” Eva Gonorowsky began, as she and her friend Yetta Aaronsohn wended their homeward way through the crowded purlieus of Gouverneur and Monroe Streets, “stands a girl by our block what don’t never goes on the school.” Yetta was obediently shocked. She had but recently been rescued from a like […]

In season and out of season Constance Bailey, that earnest young educator, preached of the value of honesty. And fifty little children of Israel who formed the First Reader class, and the one little son of Erin who led it, hearkened to her: always with politeness, and sometimes with surprise. To some of the boys […]