His kind patrons noticed with surprise that he seemed sad and depressed after the expulsion of Grid, and that this gloominess was deepened about the time of Snow's ball. Barton came to take a real pleasure in his school. Formed to love everything, and without the power of hating, or of long retaining a resentment, he became attached to his little flock, especially the younger ones, and was loved in return by them, without reserve or doubt. He did much to improve, not alone the minds of the older pupils, but to soften and refine the manners of the young men under his charge; while the young women, always inclined to idealize, found how pleasant it was to receive little acts of gentlemanly attention from him. In the afternoon of a long, bright, March day--one of those wondrous days, glorious above with sky and sun, and joyous with the first note of the blue-bird--the little red school-house by the margin of the maple-woods was filled with the pupils and their parents, assembled for the last time. Bart, in a low voice, tremulous with emotion, bade them all good-by, and most of them forever, and taking his little valise, walked with a saddened heart back to his mother. This time he had not failed, and he never was to fail again. How many events and occurrences linked in an endless series unite to form the sum-total of ordinary human life! Incident to it, they are in fact all ordinary. If any appear extraordinary, it is because they occur in the life of an extraordinary individual, or remarkable consequences flow from them. Like all parts of human life, in and of themselves they are always fragmentary: springing from what precedes them, they have no beginning proper; causing and flowing into others, they have no ending, in effect; and as the dramatic in actual life is never framed with reference to the unities, so results are constantly being produced and worked out by accidents, and the prominent events often contribute nothing to any supposed final catastrophe. Strangers interlope for a moment, and change destinies, coming out for a day, from nothing, and going to nowhere, but marring and misshaping everything.