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no great effort to hide my amusement, and call to her remembrance the complete assurance with which she was prepared to enter upon her career during her last term as a Normal Student. I also tell her I have been expecting this interview and, needless to say, from the humorous side we naturally turn to the serious. Teachers are constantly coming to me for advice as to the best method of dealing with those symptoms of original sin which cause small children to bewilder their elders by the utter depravity of their moral nature. What, for example, could I say to Kingfisher who was heard, when praying audibly, to petition heaven that Rosebud with whom she had quarrelled might lose all her good marks? The weeping Butterfly was peremptorily ushered into my presence, accused of using bad language. I could see by the expression on the teacher's face that it was no trifling matter. She had said: "Chrysanthemum, when you walk it is like the hopping of a frog." She had thus compared a fellow-scholar to an animal, a form of speech which in Chinese, as I well knew, amounts to a curse. Peach Blossom, ever since the first day she came to me has been a care and responsibility. Conscious of her good looks and of her capacity to secure a following of devotees, she has conducted her small court with increasing joy to herself, and annoyance to me and my Staff. It was impossible to ignore her presence, and while she was scrupulously within the rules and regulations of school discipline she somehow managed to sail so near, and yet avoid, the point of defiance that we were baffled. I am sometimes called upon to fulfil the vocation of motherhood in a very real sense, as when I have to announce to some child who has no mother that the arrangements for her engagement are about to be completed, but that her father, who feels he could not expect her to speak of such a matter, has asked me to find out her desires regarding the proposed bridegroom. After an inevitable tear, shed at the suggestion that she must some day leave her father's home, she asks me if I am satisfied with the plan; on my answering in the affirmative her face brightens, though she conventionally begs me to use my influence to dissuade her father from any such intention. I, seeing that no difficulty presents itself, change the subject and bring her a few days later the gifts and silver ornaments which indicate that all is settled. She, having no mother to do the necessar
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