playground under the guidance of two teachers from the Lucretia Crocker
School, Miss Roche and Miss Hayes, who had, in some mysterious manner,
convoyed these 57 atoms to the museum by car without mishap and who
apparently did not dread the necessity of getting them back again,
although to the uninitiated it appeared a task beside which grasping a
comet by the tail was a pleasant afternoon's amusement.

For the most part the story of St. George and the Dragon was a new thing
to these children. They might stand for St. George, although his
costume was a little out of the regular form at Jamaica Plain, but the
Dragon was another thing.

"I don't believe it," insisted an 8-year-old. "I seen every animal in
the Zoo in the park and I don't see any of them things." But the wistful
little boy kept insisting that there must be such an animal or Mrs.
Cronan wouldn't say so.

"That is the way they nearly always take it at first," said Mrs. Cronan.
"Nearly all of these children are here for the first time. Later they
will bring their fathers and mothers on Sunday and you might hear them
explaining the pictures upstairs as if they were the docents of the
museum.

"The object of the story hour is to familiarize the children with as
many as possible of the pictures of the Museum and to get them into the
way of coming here of themselves. When they go away they are given cards
bearing a reproduction of the picture about which the story of the day
has been told, and on these cards is always an invitation to them to
bring their families to the Museum on Saturday and Sunday, when there is
no entrance fee."