The biggest boy in the school sauntered in.  He carefully upset three dinner pails from the shelves in the rear as he hung up his hat.  I reprimanded him most severely, but I finished my lecture before he had replaced the cans.  Then he shuffled to his place and got out a book as a sign that school might begin.

Now, I always liked that biggest boy.  He knew his position so well.  He knew just how far it was proper for him to go, and never once did he overstep those bounds.  He held the respect and fear of his juniors without making any open breach with the teacher.  But in one way William Bellus had been peculiarly favored.  His predecessors had to deal with Perry Thomas, and in spite of his gentle ways and intellectual cast, Perry is active and wiry.  He is a blacksmith by trade, and is the leading tenor in the Methodist choir.  This makes a combination that for staying powers has few equals.  My biggest boy’s predecessor had been utterly broken.  Even the girls jeered at him until he quit school entirely.  But William had another problem.  It was the disappointment of his life that Perry Thomas retired just as he came into power.  He had declared at a mass-meeting behind the woodshed that it was a gross injustice on the part of the directors to put a crippled teacher in charge of the school.  Where now was glory to be gained?  They would have a school-ma’am next, like they done up to Popolomus, and none but little boys, and girls not yet out of plaits, would be so servile as to suffer such domination.  Mark Hope, the soldier, he honored!  Mark Hope, the veteran, he revered!  Mark Hope, the teacher, he despised; for his crutches made him a safe barricade against which no Biggest Boy with a spark of honor would dare to hurl himself.  There might be in the school boys base enough to charge that he lacked spirit in his attitude of armed neutrality.  Let those traducers step forward, whether they be two or a dozen.  What would follow, the Biggest Boy did not say; but he had pulled off his coat, and there was none to dispute him.  His position was established.  Thereafter he assumed toward me a calm indifference.  He was never openly offensive.  He always kept within certain carefully laid bounds of supercilious politeness.  At first he was exasperating, and I longed to have him forget himself and overstep those bounds, that I might make up for his disappointment in being cheated out of Perry Thomas.  But he never did.

To-day William Bellus really opened the school, for not till he had buried his face in his book did the general buzz begin.

That buzz was maddening.  For three long hours I had to sit there and listen to the children as they droned over and over their lessons.  Yet this was my life’s work.  To my care Six Stars had intrusted her young, and I should be proud of that trust and earnest in its fulfilment.  But Tim’s letter was in my pocket.  It was full of the big things of this life.  It told of great