Other members of the former cabinet and staff were equally refractory, and at three o'clock every afternoon, save on the regrettably frequent occasions when Miss Blake was obliged to require their continued presence in Room 19, they flocked back to their old posts of duty. They fell upon the window-boxes, the aquarium, the pencils, and the blackboards with endearments and caresses, and they utterly swept away and annihilated the slow-footed new-comers whom Miss Bailey was trying to initiate in their duties. A clumsy boy named David Boskowitz had succeeded to the portfolio of Gold Fishes. Now a gold fish, even of eighteen-carat quality, is not warranted to endure the endearments and refreshments lavished upon it by fifty emotional members of a race whose ancestors once wandered to adoration of a Golden Calf. During Morris's tenure of office Miss Bailey had frequently been obliged to renew his charges. And some mysterious tragedy was played in the fish theatre one night shortly after David Boskowitz took office. Morris, slipping into Room 18 before school hours, to bestow a defunct carnation upon Teacher, found a gold fish floating, wrong side up, among the seaweed in the shining bowl. With howls he pointed it out to Miss Bailey. Together they retrieved it. Then Teacher wrapped it reverently in tissue paper and commissioned Morris to go forth and give it decent burial in the nearest ash barrel. But Morris did nothing of the kind. He carried it about with him for days, and stirred up sentiments of wildest revolution in the hot hearts of his contemporaries by showing them the limp body of their pet, foully done to death by "them new kids what Teacher had." Miss Blake found "Bailey's Babies" astonishingly unmanageable. The difficulty lay in the different conception of the art of teaching held by these two exponents. Miss Bailey, as has been said, was of the garden school. She regarded the children as plants, knowledge as water; her part in the scheme of things to understudy the sunshine, and to coax the plants to absorb the water. Miss Blake was of the carpenter school. She held that facts were hard and straight; minds not quite so hard, and never straight; her duty to saw and bore, sand-paper and file the minds until the facts could be smoothly glued upon them. "Bailey's Babies" felt this difference though they did not understand it. In fact life was getting generally incomprehensible. For were not Hymie Solomon, the greenhorn, who had not yet learned English, Jakey Fishandler, who was so bad that no teacher except Miss Bailey would have him in her class, and Becky Zalmanowsky, who--though the First Readers did not appreciate it--was a perfect type of the criminal idiot, were not these allowed to bask in Miss Bailey's presence, while self-respecting, hard-working First Readers were thrown into outer darkness?