The thirty young faces that looked up into his grew very solemn, too.

Then their teacher smiled and said:  “But instead of keeping you in, this time, I will keep you out.  I give every boy in the room permission to stay one hour after school and play in the snow.”

Thirty happy small boys went bounding out into the white school yard.

While they were building a snow fort and storming it with cannon-balls of snow, their teacher wrote their “excuses”—­one to be carried by each boy when he went home from school an hour late.

When the joyous hour was over, Mr. Newman rang the bell and the boys came up to the schoolhouse and were given their excuses.  They thought it very funny to be kept “out” an hour after school, instead of being kept “in,” and to carry an excuse home instead of to school.

“We will have poor lessons every day, if you will punish us this way, Mr. Newman,” said one of the biggest boys.

“This kind of punishment is given only when a six-inch snow covers the school yard at Hamlet,” said the teacher.

The boys all went happily home with cold noses and fingers and toes, but warm hearts for their teacher, whom they were beginning to think was the greatest man they knew.

“I tell you I’m going to be up on that geography and grammar to-morrow,” said Fred Walton.

“And I’m going to know how to do those examples to-morrow,” said Leonard King.

And the next day the boys all had extra good lessons, if the school yard was covered with trampled snow and the battered snow fort still under the trees.

ELSIE’S ADVICE.

“Now, Maud Anna Belinda,” said Elsie, “I want you to sit up straight and listen to me.  I have something to say to you; something you should be glad to hear.”

It was hardly worth while to ask Maud Anna Belinda to sit up straight, for she was already straight, indeed, with her hands hanging down stiffly at her sides, and her eyes right out in front of her.

“I have some good advice to give you,” Elsie went on, “for your manners.  There’s company manners and there’s home-folks manners.  Some people have very fine company manners, but their home-folks manners are horrid.  They make all their smiles in company, and just have frowns and pouts and frets for the family; which of course, you know, is very unfair and not nice at all.  Some people don’t divide theirs up; they have manners that are just the same all the time.  And this is a much better way, especially if they are a pleasant kind, my dear.

“Some people get their manners at Paris, and some people’s mothers tell them to them when they are young.  But my dear Maud Anna Belinda, if you want yours to be good and lovely through and through, you must have a good and lovely heart that’s full of kindness and best wishes to everybody.  Those are the sort they have in heaven, and heaven’s a better place to get them from than Paris, I guess.