Gentle teacher, you who read these lines, you know who was to take care 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 awake.  Her dresses always fitted her perfectly, and her skirts trailed at the proper angle, but yet there was a feeling, all the time, that she had been poured into the mould that the dressmaker had prepared, and now that she had got hard, you could strike her with a hammer and not break her up, though you could not help thinking that it must have taken a very hot fire ever to melt her.

She wore glasses, too.  Not spectacles, but a dainty pair of eye glasses, set in gold, that sat astride of her nose in a very dignified fashion and crowned the everlasting smile that was spread out below them.  In fact Miss Stone was so superior a person that one wondered how it ever happened that she should condescend to teach school at all.

But this was only a general view of the case.

When viewed in detail the fact appeared that although Elvira was proud she was also poor!

This accounted for her being in the schoolroom.