FullReads

“You all know how Beauty helps you. How it strengthens you for your work. Why, in the morning when you come to school you see a beautiful thing which cheers you for the whole day. Now, see if you can’t tell me what it is.”

Another heavy silence followed and Miss Langdon turned again to Teacher.

“Don’t you teach them by the Socratic method?” she asked loftily.

“Oh, yes,” Miss Bailey replied, and then, with a hospitable desire to make her guest feel quite at home, she added: “But facts must be closely correlated with their thought-content. Their apperceiving basis is not large.”

“Ah, yes; of course,” said the expert vaguely, but with a new consideration, and then to the waiting class: “Children, the beautiful thing I’m thinking of is green. Can’t you think of something green and beautiful which you see every morning?”

Eva Gonorowsky’s big brown eyes fixed solemnly upon Teacher, flamed with sudden inspiration, and Teacher stiffened with an equally sudden fear. For smoothly starched and green was her whole shirtwaist, and carefully tied and green was her neat stock.

Eva whispered jubilantly to Morris Mogilewsky, and another rumour swept the ranks. Intelligence flashed into face after face, and Miss Bailey knew that her fear was not unfounded, for, though Miss Langdon was waving an explanatory arm towards the open window, the gaze of the First Reader Class, bright with appreciation and amusement, was fixed on its now distracted teacher.

“You can see this beautiful green joy sometimes when you are in the street,” Miss Langdon ambled on; “but you see it best when you are here.”

Three hands shot up into the quiet air.

“And I don’t think the children in the other rooms see it as well as you do.”

“No ma’am,” cried a delighted chorus, and eight more hands were raised. Prompting was reckless now and hands sprang up in all directions.

“No, I don’t think they do,” Miss Langdon agreed. “I think perhaps that Heaven meant it just for you. Just for the good little boys and girls in this room.”

The enthusiasm grew wild and general. Miss Langdon turned a glance of triumph upon Miss Bailey, and was somewhat surprised by the very scarlet confusion which she saw.

“It’s all in the method,” she said with pride, and, to the class: “Now, can you tell me the name of this beautiful green thing which makes us all so happy?”

And the answer was a great, glad cry of: “Teacher’s jumper!”

“What?”

“Teacher’s jumper!” shouted the children as before, and Eva Gonorowsky, who had been the first to guess the jocular lady’s meaning, put it more plainly.

“Missis Bailey’s got a green waist. Green is all the style this year.”

Miss Langdon sat down suddenly; stared; gasped; and then, as she was a clever woman, laughed.

“Miss Bailey,” she said, “you have a problem here. I wish you all success, but the apperceiving basis is, as you say, very limited.”

To the solving of this problem Teacher bent all her energies. Through diligent research she learned that the reading aloud of standard poems has been known to do wonders of mental and moral uplifting. But standard poems are not commonly adapted to minds six years old and of foreign extraction, so that Miss Bailey, though she explained, paraphrased, and commented, hardly flattered herself that the result was satisfactory. In courteous though puzzled silence the First Reader Class listened to enough of the poetry of the ages to have lifted them as high as Heaven. Wordsworth, Longfellow, Browning, any one who had seen and written of the beauty of bird or growing thing, was pressed into service. And then one day Miss Bailey brought her Shelley down and read his “Ode to the Skylark.”

“Now, don’t you think that’s a pretty thing?” she asked. “Did you hear how the lark went singing, bright and clear, up and up and up into the blue sky?”

The children were carefully attentive, as ever, but not responsive. Morris Mogilewsky felt that he had alone understood the nature of this story. It was meant to amuse; therefore it was polite that one should be amused.