Harry, herself, gave little thought to anything beyond her work. As soon as she began teaching, all the interest and pleasure which she had taken in it before revived with an ardor to kindle the most indifferent child. She had been cut off so abruptly from her companionship with girls that her heart was still a little bit sore from the tearing loose of old bonds. Also, she had been in her new environment just long enough to feel, beneath the material interests and excitement of new work and prospects, the ache of loneliness for friends. In her six months of wilderness life she had made the acquaintance of enough people to realize with startling emphasis how frankly dishonest and also what crudely and unassumingly good pioneers men and women are. With senses alert for such things she saw what school life--all too short for these sturdy workers--might be made to mean. That flow of warm good will helped to carry her far over the difficult beginning, for it was hard at the start. Her pupils were of all ages from six to fifteen and of as many dispositions. All, of course, were suspicious of the new teacher who had supplanted the one they knew. "They look at me," Harry reflected, inwardly amused, "as I might view a boa constrictor coiled in a college professor's chair. If they only knew how much that is interesting a boa constrictor could tell them! Well, I'll show them how I'm not like one--Attention, please!" She smiled at them as they turned, surprised, on their way to the door. (It was Friday afternoon and they were in a hurry to be off.) "You are all invited to meet me here to-morrow evening at seven o'clock," she went on, "girls please wear aprons as we are going to make candy. That'll show them I'm half human," she added to herself, watching the faint start of surprise that went through them, followed by smiles and murmured thanks. That was a good beginning even though between beginning and finishing may be a hilly road. But it was Harry's belief that every one loved adventure, every one dreamed of romantic deeds with himself the hero. From this she had decided that every one would work and study with gusto if the task were skillfully presented to the imagination as a living, pulsing part of the great romance--life. But the theories which she had evolved while teaching carefully reared girls from well-to-do families was not certain to fit all cases. The first month at Stone Bridge district school was destructive to all theories and nearly baffled her.