care, and handing them over to the
ministrations of another.

The promise of new seedlings did not comfort her. She felt outraged by
it, as a man bereaved of a fox terrier may feel toward the friend to
whom a dog is a dog, and who boasts that he knows where he can get
another worth two of the dear departed.

In the afternoon Miss Blake appeared, and the unsuspecting First Readers
were put through their paces. They sang, they marched, they read, and
they wrote. They would have gone gallantly on through all the other
subjects in their curriculum if she had found time to stay, but she had
left Room 19 in charge of a monitor, and that monitor's inability to
preserve order made itself heard through door and wall, so that
presently she declared herself quite satisfied, and retired to her own
kingdom. A deadly silence followed upon her arrival there.

"They has awful 'fraids over her," Sarah Schodsky remarked. "A girl by
her class tells me how she throws rulers once on a boy."

"I'd have a 'fraid over her too," cried Yetta Aaronsohn. "I don't like I
shall have no teachers what is big like that. I have all times 'fraids
over big teachers."

"You've never had one," laughed Miss Bailey, "so don't talk nonsense.
Big teachers are much nicer than little ones."

"They ain't fer me," Yetta maintained. "I ain't never had no teacher
on'y you, and I don't needs I shall never have no teacher on'y you."

From these conversational straws Miss Bailey gathered that it would be
unwise to insist too strongly upon the personal element in "developing
the promotion thought." Promotion had formed no part in the experience
or the vocabulary of the First Readers Class before Miss Bailey somewhat
guilefully introduced it.

The children were delighted. They always loved things vague and looming,
and Miss Bailey--animated by duty--spoke so enthusiastically of
promotion that they all thrilled to experience it. The phrase, "when I'm
'moted," grew very fashionable. No one knew exactly what it meant, but
it was something more imminent than the "when I'm big" of the boys, and
the "when I git married" of the girls. It was something, too, in which
one's prowess as a reader and writer was to count for righteousness;
"For of course," Miss Bailey explained, "we can't expect to be promoted
if we don't know how to read: 'see the leaves fall from the tree.'" (It
was easier to read than to do in January on the lower East Side.)

The First Readers were hard