ah
to think was to act, and she popped the snake into the pocket of her
middy blouse, pinning it with a safety pin in lieu of a button and
button hole. When the class returned from the auditorium, she was
sitting sedately in her seat and appeared only mildly interested in
the lecture on tardiness which followed.

"We'll have the papers distributed on which you worked during the
last drawing lesson," announced Miss Ames unexpectedly. "The drawing
supervisor will be around next week and we are a lesson or two late,
here in our room. Instead of spelling this morning, I'll have you
paint the leaves you drew. George Wright, you distribute the papers
and Sarah Willis, you know where the paint boxes are."

Sarah was monitor for the drawing materials and she went up and down
the aisles, giving each pupil a small paint box and two brushes,
while George Wright gave out the papers on which the pencil sketches
of autumn leaves had been drawn.

The warmth of the pocket evidently revived the chilled snake and, as
Sarah was bending over the desk of Annabel Warde, a dainty little
girl about her own age, a lithe green body shot from out Sarah's
blouse, wriggled across the desk and dropped to the floor. The
safety pin had left too large a loop-hole.

"A snake!" screamed Annabel, flinging her box of paints in one
direction and the brushes Sarah had just given her, in the other. "I
saw it! I saw it! Miss Ames, I saw a snake, and it's right here in
this room. It'll bite us, I know it will and we'll die! Catch it,
somebody, Oh, please hurry!"

Jumping up and down and shrieking, Annabel was beside herself with
fright. Several other little girls began to scream, too, and the
boys rushed around the room shouting that they would catch it and
kill it, whatever "it" might be. None of them thought that Annabel
had really seen a snake.

"Don't hurt it!" warned Sarah, down on her hands and knees and
hunting under the desks for her lost pet. "This kind of snake won't
bite any one, and you mustn't hurt it. I want to keep it all winter
and watch it grow."

Miss Ames was trying to calm Annabel who persisted in sitting on top
of her desk with her feet curled under her, apparently under the
delusion that a snake always attacks the ankles first, when George
Wright whooped triumphantly.

"I see it--gee, it really is a snake!" he shouted. "Look out, Peter,
let me shy this paper-weight at him--there, I'll bet that mashed him
into jelly!"

There w