vernacular. "Come," said he,
"suit the action to the word."

Emmy Lou woke suddenly, the words smiting her ears with ominous import.
She thought the hour had come, it was The Exhibition.

She stood stiffly, she advanced a cautious foot, her chubby hand
described a careful half circle. Emmy Lou spoke--

"We know not where we go," said Emmy Lou.

"No more we do," said Uncle Charlie.

THE SHADOW OF A TRAGEDY

Miss Lizzie kept in.

The ways of teachers like rainy days and growing pains belong to the
inexplicable and inevitable. All teachers have ways, that is to be
expected, it is the part of an Emmy Lou to adjust herself to meet, not
to try to understand, these ways.

Miss Lizzie kept in, but that was only one of her ways, she had many
others. Perhaps they were no more peculiar than the ways of her
predecessors, but they were more alarming.

Miss Lizzie placed a deliberate hand on her call bell and, as its
vibrations dinged and smote upon the shrinking tympanum, a rigid and
breathless expectancy would pervade the silence of the Fourth Reader
room.

Miss Lizzie was tall, she seemed to tower up and over one's personality.
One had no mind of her own, but one said what one thought Miss Lizzie
wanted her to say. Sometimes one got it wrong. Then Miss Lizzie's cold
up-and-down survey smote one into a condition something akin to vacuity,
until Miss Lizzie said briefly, "Sit down."

Then one sat down hastily.

Miss Lizzie never wasted a word. Miss Lizzie closed her lips. She closed
them so their lines were blue. Her eyes were blue too, but not a
pleasant blue. Miss Lizzie did not scold, she looked. She kept looking
until one became aware of an elbow resting on the desk. In her room
little girls must sit erect.

Sometimes she changed. It came suddenly. One day it came suddenly and
Miss Lizzie boxed the little girl's ears. The little girl had knocked
over a pile of slates collected on the platform for marking.

Another time she changed. It was when the little girl brought a note
from home because her ears were boxed. Miss Lizzie tore the note in
pieces and threw them on the floor.

One lived in dread of her changing. One watched in order to know the
thing she wanted. Emmy Lou knew every characteristic feature of her
face--the lean nose that bent toward the cheek, the thin lips that
tightened and relaxed, the cold survey that travelled from desk to desk.

Miss Lizzie's thin hands w