s, had chosen the path of honor, and had found it to
lead to riches, approbation, glory, and self-righteousness.

Abraham opened the purse. It contained fifteen cents. He appropriated
the nickel as a first instalment of the reward so soon to be his, and
then sped fleetly--as Miss Bailey's heroes had ever done--after the
brown-shawled matron and glory. But the matron had evidently not been
trained in the school of high honor. She regarded Abraham with
suspicion rather than with gratitude. She examined the purse in the same
spirit, and her investigations led to loud outcries upon her part, and
to swift flight upon Abraham's.

Abraham Wishnewsky was so ill-advised as to confide the details of this
adventure to a young gentleman who rejoiced in a rabbit face, close-set
lashless eyes, and the name of Isidore Cohen. Isidore was new to Room
18, and new to his place beside the gentle Abraham. Miss Bailey and her
applied ethics were startlingly new to him. And he never reported to
Abraham any effort to experiment in revolutionary doctrines.

Some of the more credulous among the feminine First Readers also weighed
these precepts in the balance and found them wanting.

"You know how Teacher says," Sarah Schodsky remarked to Bertha
Binderwitz, as the two friends, arms intertwined, heads close together,
walked and talked in the yard at the recess hour. "You know how she says
we dasen't never to tell no lies."

Bertha nodded. "That's how she _says_," she agreed.

"Well," resumed Sarah, "you see how Mamie Untermeyer don't comes no more
on the school?"

Bertha had remarked this absence.

"Well, Mamie she lives by her auntie. She is got a awful auntie. Und she
asks her auntie for a penny for buy hokey pokey. Und her auntie makes a
mean laugh und says, 'What you think I am, anyway?' und Mamie, she tells
it right out what she thinks over her auntie, like Teacher says, 'We
shall all times tell what we thinks.' She lays on the bed now mit
bangages on the head. It ain't so awful healthy you shall tell truths
on aunties."

This report also reached the rabbit ears of Isidore Cohen. And again he
wondered that Miss Bailey should waste her time--and his--in folly.

And then he made an amazing discovery. Teacher actually believed what
she taught. She was ready to meet confidence with trust, and to practise
what she preached.

"I never seen nothing like it," he reported to his friend, Hymie
Solomon. "She looks like she knew a awful lot