hemselves the day before the entertainment and came back with new
dresses for the girls and new clothes for the boys. Of course some of
them were so small they would scarcely go on, while others were miles
big; but every one had something new and no one felt badly.

"This Christmas," concluded Miss Belle, "our entertainment packed the
school-house, and some were turned away. Just to show you how crowded it
was--there were twenty-four babies there. I was ready for them, though,
with two pounds of stick candy; so whenever a baby squalled he got a
stick of candy quick."

Strange, good things have followed the visits of the mothers to the
schools. They would never have come had it not been for the wonderful
things which their children were learning with such untoward enthusiasm.
One girl, who had been particularly successful with her needlework,
brought her mother to school--a hard woman who had a standing quarrel
with seven of her neighbors at that particular time. It took a little
tact, but when the right moment arrived Miss Belle suggested that she
pay a visit to a sick neighbor and offer to help. The woman went at
last, found that it was a very pleasant thing on the whole to be
friendly, and carried the glad tidings into her life, substituting
kindness for her previous rule of incivility. To her surprise her
enemies have all disappeared.

The mothers, coming to school to talk over the work of their children,
have for the first time seen one another at their best. Sitting over a
friendly cup of tea, chatting about Jane's dress or Willie's lessons,
they have learned the art of social intercourse. Slowly the lesson has
come to them, until to-day there is not a woman in the neighborhood who
is not on speaking terms with every one else, a situation undreamed of
five years ago.

Nine months in each year Miss Belle McCubbing holds her classes in the
Locust Grove School, which stands on the Military Pike, seven miles
outside of Lexington, Kentucky. "Angels watch over that school," says
Mrs. Faulconer. Doubtless these angels are the good angels of the
community, for in six years the bitterness of neighborhood gossip and
controversy has been replaced by a spirit of neighborly helpfulness.
Boys and girls, doing Miss Belle's "busy work," fathers and mothers
learning from their children, have heaped upon Miss Belle's deserving
head the peerless praise of a community come to itself--regenerated in
thought and act, turned from the