y
down by the bed?' She says like that, the while she knows my mamma ain't
got capes only in back, und she wants my mamma shall have shamed
feelings before all the peoples what is on the party. Und my mamma, she
says like that, just as smart, she says: 'No, I guess I don't likes I
shall lay my baby on no strange beds. It ain't healthy, maybe.' And she
holds the baby, and nobody knows how the front from that cape is, und my
mamma enjoyed a pleasant time, and my papa had a proud."

"BAILEY'S BABIES"

"Miss Bailey," said Miss Blake, entering Room 18 during the lunch hour
of a day in January, shortly after school had recovered from the
Christmas holidays, "might I come in for a few moments this afternoon to
observe your children? I suppose I shall be having them next term. Too
bad you first-grade teachers never know what you are going to get down
here! It's different up town, where the kids nearly all go to
kindergarten. Down here they sweep them right in off the street."

Miss Bailey extended a cordial invitation to her colleague and neighbor
to visit Room 18 at any convenient hour. And as she proceeded with her
solitary luncheon, she was conscious of a heaviness in the region of
her heart not due to indigestion. She had committed the folly of growing
fond of that term's crop of little First Readers. Room 18 without
Patrick Brennan, Morris Mowgelewsky, Eva Gonorowsky, and all her other
aide-de-camps and monitors would be a desolate place. And Miss Bailey,
as she munched a chicken sandwich, objected strongly to Miss Blake's
expressive phrase, "sweep them right in off the street." Yet it was
quite true. The children of whom she was now so fond had been swept in
to her in September, and she remembered that a considerable portion of
the street would seem to have been swept in with them. They had since
learned the art of scraping their small shoes on intervening stairs and
through intervening halls, but as recruits they had been all that she
dreaded in their successors. Miss Blake would now reap the benefit of
this and other improvements, while Miss Bailey devoted her energies to
a new invoice of seedlings.

Such, of course, was life. Especially a teacher's life. But Miss Bailey
was new to her trade and had not yet learned the philosophic, impersonal
view-point of the gardener. She loved her little plants individually,
and she shrank from the idea of pulling them out of their places under
the protecting glass of her