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“Do you think we can make room for her, children?” I asked.

Every small boy cried rapturously: “Look Miss Kate! Here’s room! I kin scrooge up!” and hoped the Lord would send Rosaleen his way!

“We can’t have two children in one seat;” I explained to Rosaleen’s sponsor, “because they can’t have proper building exercises nor work to good advantage when they’re crowded.”

“I kin set on the pianner stool!” gallantly offered Billy Prendergast.

“Perhaps I can borrow a little chair somewhere,” I said. “Would you like to stay with us Rosaleen?”

Her only answer (she was richer in beautiful looks than in speech) was to remove her blue velveteen hat and tranquilly placed it on my table. If she was lovely with her hair covered she was still lovelier now; while her smile of assent disclosing as it did, an irresistible dimple, completed our conquest; so that no one in the room (save Hansanella, who went on doggedly with their weaving) would have been parted from the new comer save by fire and the sword.

At one o’clock Bobby Green came back from the noon recess dragging a high chair. It was his own outgrown property and he had asked our Janitor to abbreviate its legs and bring it up stairs.

When Rosaleen sat in it and smiled, a thrill of rapture swept through the small community. The girls thrilled as well as the boys, for Rosaleen’s was not a mere sex appeal but practically a universal one.

There was one flaw in our content. Bobby Green’s mother arrived shortly after one o’clock in a high state of wrath, and I was obliged to go out in the hall and calm her nerves.

“I really think Bobby’s impulse was an honest one,” I said. “He did not know I intended to buy a chair for the new child out of my own salary this afternoon. He probably thought that the high chair was his very own, reasoning as children do, and it was a gallant, generous act. I don’t like to have him punished for it, Mrs. Green, and if we both tell him he ought to have asked your permission before giving the chair away, and if I buy you a new one, won’t you agree to drop the matter?–Think how manly Bobby was and how generous and thoughtful! If he were mine I couldn’t help being proud of him. Just peep in and look at the baby who is sitting in his chair, a little stranger, just come from Ireland to San Francisco.”

Mrs. Green peeped in and saw the sun shining on Rosaleen’s primrose head. She was stringing beads, while Bobby, Pat and Aaron knelt beside her, palpitating for a chance to serve.

“She’s real cute!” whispered Mrs. Green. “Does Bobby act very often like he’s doin’ now?”

“He’s one of the greatest comforts of my life!” I said truly.

“I wish I could say the same!” she retorted. “Well, I came round intendin’ to give him a good settlin’ but he’d had two already this week and I guess I’ll let it go! We ain’t so poverty-struck as some o’ the folks in this neighborhood and I guess we can make out to spare a chair, it’s little enough to pay for gettin’ rid of Bobby.”

Two years that miracle of beauty and sweetness, Rosaleen Clancy stayed with us, just as potent an influence as the birds or the flowers, the stories I told, or the music I coaxed from the little upright piano. Her face was not her only fortune for she had a heart of gold. Ireland did indeed have a grievance when Rosaleen left it for America!

This is just a corner of my portrait gallery, which has dozens of other types hanging on the walls clamoring to be described. Some were lovely and some interestingly ugly; some were like lilies growing out of the mud, others had not been quite as able to energize themselves out of their environment and bore the sad traces of it ever with them;–still, they were all absorbingly interesting beyond my power to paint. Month after month they sat together, working, playing, helping, growing–in a word learning how to live, and there in the midst of the group was I, learning my life lesson with them.

The study and the practice of the kindergarten theory of education and of life gave me, while I was still very young, a certain ideal by which to live and work, and it has never faded.–Never, whether richer or poorer, whether better or worse, in sickness or in health, in prosperity or adversity, never wholly to lose my glimpse of that “celestial light” that childhood-apparalled “Meadow, grove and stream, the earth and every common sight:” and to hold that attitude of mind and heart which gives to life even when it is difficult something of “the glory and the freshness of a dream!”