not conducive to rosiness of complexion; and the constant strain of
guiding over forty immature minds in the paths of knowledge will weigh
upon the flesh, though the soul be patient and the heart light. Miss
Willis's class comprised the children whose average age was twelve to
thirteen--those who had been in the school three years. There were
both boys and girls, and they remained with her a year. She had begun
with the youngest children, but promotion had presently established
her in this position.

Forty immature minds--minds just groping on the threshold of life--to
be watched, shaped, and helped for ten months, and their individual
needs treated with sympathy and patience. For ten months--the school
term,--then to be exchanged for a new batch, and so from year to year.
Glendale's manufacturing population included several nationalities, so
that the little army of scholars which sat under Miss Willis's eye
included Poles, Italians, negroes, and now and then a youthful
Chinaman, as well as the sons and daughters of the merchant, the
tailor, the butcher, and baker, and other citizens whose title as
Americans was of older date. It was not easy to keep the atmosphere of
such a school-room wholesome, for the apparel of the poorest children,
though often well darned, was not always clean, and the ventilating
apparatus represented a political job. But it was Miss Willis's pride
that she knew the identity of every one of her boys and girls, and
carried it by force of love and will written on her brain as well as
on the desk-tablets which she kept as a safeguard against possible
lapses of memory. She loved her classes, and it was a grief to her at
first to be obliged to pass them on at the end of the school year. But
habit reconciles us to the inevitable, and she presently learned to
steel her heart against a too sensitive point of view in this respect,
and to supplement the bleeding ties thus rudely severed with a fresh