“Dollie, dear, you couldn’t be in my class if you started this year, so I cannot give you permission.  You would begin your schooldays in Miss Primson’s room,” was the reply.

“Why, she’s the cross-looking teacher, with black eyes that look like this!”

Dollie touched the fore-finger of each hand with its thumb, thus making rings through which she peeped, in imitation of spectacles, and frowned as darkly as her baby face would permit.

Miss Sterling knew that she should not laugh at the grimace, but it was so very funny that she could not help it.

“Miss Primson is to teach in another town next season, so if you wait ’til next year you will have a new teacher to commence with, and you can work very hard, so as to get into my room as soon as possible,” she said.

The child’s face lighted with a happy smile.

“Oh, then, I don’t want to go this year!” she cried, “I’ll stay at home, as mama said, and keep school with my dolls and the kittens, but will you come sometimes, and see if I teach them right?”

“I certainly will,” Miss Sterling said, kindly, “and I do hope your little class will behave nicely.”

“The dolls will,” said Dollie, hopefully, “but the kittens’ manners are—­awful!”

“Then that shows how much they need a teacher,” Miss Sterling said, and Dollie felt sure that it must be right for her to remain at home, that those kittens might not be neglected.

“They run away ’thout asking to be s’cused, and they walk right into the saucer of milk.  I don’t s’pect them to use spoons, but they needn’t sit down in it.  How’d I look, if I sat down in my plate when I was eating?”

There was no one near to answer her question, and the little girl hurried home, convinced that there must be no delay in educating the kittens.

There was one small person in the town who feared the opening of school, and that was Gyp.

During vacation days he was care free, but as it neared the time when all the children of Avondale would be, for the greater part of the day, in school, he began to watch any person who passed the shanty that he called “home,” and to view with terror the blue coat of a policeman.

“They shan’t ketch me!” he muttered, “I won’t go to school!”

His mother, as ignorant as himself, enjoyed using him as a wood gatherer, and thus insisted that he was not old enough to go to school, when questioned by a member of the school committee.

“Not old enough!” cried the man in disgust, “why, woman, any child five years old can go to school.”

“Gyp ain’t five yet!” the woman had answered, stolidly.

“It’s no use talking that way,” was the quick reply, “he’s Nine if he’s a day.  I think it’s more likely that he’s ten.  Ye can’t keep a child out of school unless he’s less’n five, or over fourteen.”

“Then he’s over fourteen!” cried the woman.