With the right kind of training and influence Isaac Ross would have been a fine boy, for there were in his disposition many noble traits of character, and when he saw how readily George gave up the seat, he refused to take it, saying, “he didn’t care a _darn_ where he sat—one place was as good as another.” That day was long and dreary enough. Not more than half the children were there, and I found it exceedingly tiresome and monotonous, sitting in that hard, splint-bottomed chair, and telling Emma Fitch and Sophia Brown, for the hundredth time, that the round letter was “O” and the crooked one “S.” The scholars, too, began to grow noisy, and to ask me scores of useless questions. Their lessons were half learned, and if I made a suggestion, I was quickly informed that their former teacher, Sally Damm, didn’t do so. Even little Emma Fitch, when I bade her keep her eyes on the book instead of letting them wander about the room, lisped out that “Thally Damm let her look off;” a fact I did not dispute when I found that she had been to school all winter without learning a single letter by sight, though she could repeat the entire alphabet forward and back and be all the while watching a squirrel on the branches of the tree which grew near the window. Before night a peculiar kind of sickness, never dangerous, but decidedly disagreeable, began to creep over me, and had it not been for the mud, I should probably have footed it to Meadow Brook, where alone could be found the cure for my disease. Just before school was out a little boy cried to go home, and this was the one straw too many. Hastily dismissing the scholars, I turned towards the window and my tears fell as fast as did the rain in the early morning. “The schoolma’am’s cryin,’—she is. I saw her,” circulated rapidly among the children, who all rushed back to ascertain the truth for themselves. “I should think she would cry,” said one of the girls to her brother. “You’ve acted ugly enough to make anybody cry, and if you don’t behave better to-morrow, Jim Maxwell, I’ll tell mother!” After the delivery of this speech, the entire group moved away, leaving me alone; and sure am I there was never a more homesick child than was the one, who, with her head lying upon the desk, sat there weeping in that low, dirty schoolroom, on that dark, rainy afternoon. Where now was all the happiness I had promised myself in teaching? Alas! it was rapidly disappearing, and I was just making up my mind to brave the ridicule of Meadow Brook, and give up my school at once, when a hand was laid very gently on my shoulder, and a voice partially familiar said, “What’s the matter, _Rose_?”