t the house and premises. Kate was enjoying herself
immensely, before the week was over. She had another row of wood
corded to the shed roof, in case the winter should be severe. She had
the stove she thought would warm her room polished and set up while he
was there to do it. She had the back porch mended and the loose board
in the front walk replaced. She borrowed buckets and cloths and
impressed George Holt for the cleaning of the school building which she
superintended. Before the week was over she had every child of school
age who came to the building to see what was going on, scouring out
desks, blacking stoves, raking the yard, even cleaning the street
before the building.

Across the street from his home George sawed the dead wood from the
trees and then, with three days to spare, Kate turned her attention to
the ravine. She thought that probably she could teach better there in
the spring than in the school building. She and George talked it over.
He raised all the objections he could think of that the townspeople
would, while entirely agreeing with her himself, but it was of no use.
She over-ruled the proxy objections he so kindly offered her, so he was
obliged to drag his tired body up the trees on both banks for several
hundred yards and drop the dead wood. Kate marshalled a corps of boys
who would be her older pupils and they dragged out the dry branches,
saved all that were suitable for firewood, and made bonfires from the
remainder. They raked the tin cans and town refuse of years from the
water and banks and induced the village delivery man to haul the stuff
to the river bridge and dump it in the deepest place in the stream.
They cleaned the creek bank to the water's edge and built rustic seats
down the sides. They even rolled boulders to the bed and set them
where the water would show their markings and beat itself to foam
against them. Mrs. Holt looked on in breathless amazement and
privately expressed to her son her opinion of him in terse and vigorous
language. He answered laconically: "Has a fish got much to say about
what happens to it after you get it out of the water?"

"No!" snapped Mrs. Holt, "and neither have you, if you kill yourself to
get it."

"Do I look killed?" inquired her son.

"No. You look the most like a real man I ever saw you," she conceded.

"And Kate Bates won't need glasses for forty years yet," he said as he
went back to his work in the ravine.

Kate was in t