The first thing was, of course, to make a beginning with the new language. Afterward when Mary Antin was asked to describe the way the teacher had worked with her foreign class she replied with a smile, "I can't vouch for the method, but the six children in my own particular group (ranging in age from six to fifteen--I was then twelve) attacked the see-the-cat and look-at-the-hen pages of our primers with the keenest zest, eager to find how the common world looked, smelled, and tasted in the strange speech, and we learned!" There was a dreadful time over learning to say _the_ without making a buzzing sound; even mastering the v's and w's was not so hard as that. It was indeed a proud day for Mary Antin when she could say "We went to the village after water," to her teacher's satisfaction. How Mary Antin loved the American speech! She had a native gift for language, and gathered the phrases eagerly, lovingly, as one gathers flowers, ever reaching for more and still more. She said the words over and over to herself with shining eyes as the miser counts his gold. Soon she found that she was thinking in the beautiful English way. When she had been only four months at school she wrote a composition on _Snow_ that her teacher had printed in a school journal to show this foreign child's wonderful progress in the use of the new tongue. Here is a bit of that composition: Now the trees are bare, and no flowers are to see in the fields and gardens (we all know why), and the whole world seems like a-sleep without the happy bird songs which left us till spring. But the snow which drove away all these pretty and happy things, try (as I think) not to make us at all unhappy; they covered up the branches of the trees, the fields, the gardens and houses, and the whole world looks like dressed in a beautiful white--instead of green--dress, with the sky looking down on it with a pale face.... At the middle of the year the child who had entered the primer class in September without a word of English was promoted to the fifth grade. She was indeed a proud girl when she went home with her big geography book making a broad foundation for all the rest of the pile, which she loved to carry back and forth just because it made her happy and proud to be seen in company with books. "Look at that pale, hollow-chested girl with that load of books," said a kindly passer-by one day. "It is a shame the way children are overworked in school these days."