“Oh, miserable me, I’ve locked them out!” thought the little teacher in dismay.

She hastened to the door and opened it, and they rushed in with a shout.  This was an odd beginning; but Kyzie said not a word.  She remembered that she was now Miss Dunlee, so she threw back her shoulders and looked her straightest and tallest, and as much as possible like Miss Prince, her favorite teacher.  She had intended all along to imitate Miss Prince—­whenever she could think of it.

Only fourteen years old!  Well, what of that?  Grandma Parlin had been only fourteen when she taught her first school.  Keep a brave heart, Katharine Dunlee!

Joe Rolfe walked in as stiffly as a wooden soldier.  Behind him came a few boys and girls, some of them with their fingers in their mouths.  There were twelve in all.  The last ones to enter were Nate and Jimmy, followed by Aunt Lucy and her niece arm in arm.

“I wonder if Nate is laughing at me for locking the door?” thought Kyzie, not daring to look at him, as she waved her hands and said in a loud voice to be heard above the noise:—­

“All please be seated.”

Being seated was a work of time; and what a din it made!  The children wandered about, trying one bench after another to see which they liked best.

“You would think they were getting settled for life,” whispered Nate to Jimmy.

The “little two” chose a place near the west window and began at once to write on their slates.

“I’m scared of Miss Dunlee,” wrote Aunt Lucy.

“Stop making me laugh,” replied the niece.

When at last everybody was “settled for life,” Kyzie did not know what to do next.  “What would Miss Prince do?  Why she would read in the Bible.  I forgot that.”

The new teacher took her stand on the platform behind the desk, opened her Bible, and read aloud the twenty-third Psalm.  Her voice shook, partly from fright, partly from trying so hard not to laugh.  But she did not even smile—­far from it.  Nate and Jimmy who were watching her could have told you that.  If she had been at a funeral she could hardly have looked more solemn.

Jimmy touched Nate’s foot under the bench; Nate gave Jimmy a shove; Bab gazed hard at Lucy’s flaxen cue; Lucy gazed straight at her thumb.

After the reading “Miss Dunlee” walked about with her blank-book in one hand and her pen in the other to take down the children’s names.

“I’m Joseph Rolfe; don’t you remember me?” said the boy with red hair.  “And this boy next seat is Chicken Little.”

“No, I ain’t either, I’m Henry Small,” corrected the little fellow, ready to cry.

Kyzie shook her finger at both the boys and resolved that “Joe should stop calling names, and Henry should stop being such a cry-baby.”

Annie Farrell was a dear little girl in a blue and white gingham gown, and the new teacher loved her at once.  Dorothy Pratt was little more than a baby, and when spoken to she put her apron to her eyes and wanted to go home.