th. The doctor had
scolded her and had declared she was in danger of
losing her hearing. It was foolish for Kate Swift to be
abroad in the storm, foolish and perhaps dangerous.

The woman in the streets did not remember the words of
the doctor and would not have turned back had she
remembered. She was very cold but after walking for
five minutes no longer minded the cold. First she went
to the end of her own street and then across a pair of
hay scales set in the ground before a feed barn and
into Trunion Pike. Along Trunion Pike she went to Ned
Winters' barn and turning east followed a street of low
frame houses that led over Gospel Hill and into Sucker
Road that ran down a shallow valley past Ike Smead's
chicken farm to Waterworks Pond. As she went along, the
bold, excited mood that had driven her out of doors
passed and then returned again.

There was something biting and forbidding in the
character of Kate Swift. Everyone felt it. In the
schoolroom she was silent, cold, and stern, and yet in
an odd way very close to her pupils. Once in a long
while something seemed to have come over her and she
was happy. All of the children in the schoolroom felt
the effect of her happiness. For a time they did not
work but sat back in their chairs and looked at her.

With hands clasped behind her back the school teacher
walked up and down in the schoolroom and talked very
rapidly. It did not seem to matter what subject came
into her mind. Once she talked to the children of
Charles Lamb and made up strange, intimate little
stories concerning the life of the dead writer. The
stories were told with the air of one who had lived in
a house with Charles Lamb and knew all the secrets of
his private life. The children were somewhat confused,
thinking Charles Lamb must be someone who had once
lived in Winesburg.

On another occasion the teacher talked to the children
of Benvenuto Cellini. That time they laughed. What a
bragging, blustering, brave, lovable fellow she made of
the old artist! Concerning him also she invented
anecdotes. There was one of a German music teacher who
had a room above Cellini's lodgings in the city of
Milan that made the boys guffaw. Sugars McNutts, a fat
boy with red cheeks, laughed so hard that he became
dizzy and fell off his seat and Kate Swift laughed with
him. Then suddenly she became again cold and stern.

On the winter night when she walked through the
deserted snow-covered streets, a crisis h