Conditions of this sort were discouraging indeed, but she met the situation with characteristic courage, and added to her other duties the task of teaching a little music and English in these schools. The introduction of these subjects proved to be very successful in reviving the pupils' flagging interest. "The girls are more interested just now," a letter says, "because they have once a week a lesson in singing; formerly it was given on Saturday in our home, but experience soon taught me that this was an impossibility on account of the continuous callers and disturbances. I go now to each school once a week and teach them there. They also have a lesson in English during the week. It seems so strange to me that all people, old and young, male and female, are seeking a knowledge of English." She was quick to see, however, that the only permanently successful solution of the day school problem was in well-trained teachers. Her great desire was for "the day when day school teachers should be better qualified for their work, that they might draw pupils to school by their own knowledge." In the meantime she did all she could to add to the efficiency of the teachers she had. One of her letters tells of her efforts to help one of her discouraged assistants: "One of the teachers is very anxious and feels that she cannot teach the school. She spoke to me several times of her inability to keep the pupils' attention because of her own lack of knowledge. As we have no trained teachers to take her place I cannot spare her. Though she has not a good head she has a good Christian heart, so for the good of the school I have to keep her and give her a few lessons each week. It is doing her good and helping her to teach better." Again she reported the following year, "A special effort was made to throw away the old, parrot-like way of learning. As the teachers needed instruction as well as the pupils, sometimes, the text-books were taken away. The teachers were required to tell a story every day; and with the story a verse of the Scriptures, meant for a peg on which to hang the tale, was committed to memory by the girls. The teacher would write six easy characters each afternoon on the blackboard for the girls to copy before going home. Thus the girls learned how to listen, to memorize, and to write. Since the number of girls increases perceptibly when we have a little English I use it as a bait. By Miss Merrill's consent, help was secured from the boarding-school in teaching half an hour of English every day in the two city schools."