And do not say that I have overdrawn this picture, either.  Don’t turn up your noses, my dears, because this girl came from a very humble and unpretentious Irish family.  I tell you, genius has a way of its own, and there is no accounting for it.  It was a good while ago that a conservative old Pharisee thought that he had forever silenced the followers of the greatest Genius the world ever saw by putting at them the conundrum, “Can any good come out of Nazareth?” But good did come out of that barren country in spite of the conundrum!  And so it keeps on doing, constantly.  It comes from other places, too, and that is all right.  The point is that we want to open our eyes and see it, no matter where it comes from.

Amy Kelly was a godsend to “Dodd” Weaver.  She came to him through the medium of a country school.  She won the boy as such teachers always do win boys, and always will win them; and her reward ought to be great.  It was only twenty-five dollars a month, reckoned on the order book of “deestrick four,” but there is no telling what it will be on the “other side.”  But such as Amy can afford to wait for that.

CHAPTER IX.

“Dodd” went to school to Amy Kelly faithfully all that summer.  He was neither tardy nor absent during the term, and when school was over it 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 view of them.  This constant cheating of his vision, this deferring of his hope, in time made his heart sick, and he gradually relapsed into his old hatred of books and schools and school teachers and all that pertained thereto.