=Resourcefulness.=—­In her work there is a fineness and a delicacy of touch that baffles a satisfactory analysis.  She has the power to call forth Columbus from the past to reenact his great discovery in the imagination of her pupils—­all without noise, or bombast, or gesticulation.  She does what she does because she is what she is; and she needs neither copyright nor patent for protection.  Her work is suffused with a rare sort of enthusiasm that carries conviction by reason of its genuineness.  This enthusiasm gives to her work a tone and a flavor that can neither be disguised nor counterfeited.  Her work is distinctive, but not sensational or pyrotechnic.  Least of all is it ever hackneyed.  So resourceful is she in devising new plans and new ways of saying and doing things that her pupils are always animated by a wholesome expectancy.  She is the dynamo, but the light and heat that she generates manifest themselves in the minds of her pupils, while she remains serene and quiet.

=The thirteen colonies.=—­With the poet Keats she can sing: 

  Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all
  Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Animated by this sentiment, she disdains no form of truth, whether large or small, for in every form of truth she finds beauty; and her spirit reacts to it on the instant, and joy is the resultant.  This is the basis for her superb enthusiasm in every detail of her work as well as the source of her joyous living.  Her pupils may name the thirteen original colonies without a slip, but that is not enough for her.  The establishing of these colonies formed a mighty epoch in history, and she must dwell upon the events until they throb through the life currents of her pupils.  Names in books must mean people with all their hopes, their aspirations, their trials and hardships, their sorrows and their joys.  The conditions of life, the food, the clothing, the houses, the modes of travel, and the dangers must all come into the mental picture.  Hence it is that she prepares for the lesson on the colonies as she would make ready for a trip with the pupils around the world, and the mere giving of names is negligible in her inspiring enterprise.

=Every subject invested with life.=—­She finds in the circulation of the blood a subject of great import and makes ready for the lesson with enthusiastic anticipation.  Her step is elastic as she takes her way to school on this particular day, and her face is beaming, for to-day comes to the children this stupendous revelation.  She feels as did the college professor when he was just ready to begin an experiment in his laboratory and said to his students, “Gentlemen, please remove your hats; I am about to ask God a question.”  She approaches every truth reverently, albeit joyously, for she feels that she is the leader of the children over into the Promised Land.  In the book already quoted, Professor Phelps says, “I read in a German play that the mathematician is like a man who lives in a glass room at the top of a mountain covered with eternal snow—­he sees eternity and infinity all about him, but not much humanity.”  Not so in her teaching of mathematics; for every subject and every problem transports her to the Isle of Patmos, and the hour is crowded with revelations.