“Clean hands first!” said Miss Moss, and there ensued a scrubbing bee. Then the curtains were put up, with much awkward help from the children, who were unused to such tasks. When all hung in snowy beauty, then Miss Moss gathered her helpers about her, and told them fairy stories while they ate the candy that was in the box. It was really a little party, and a party is a rare thing in the life of a miner’s child. That was Miss Moss’ beginning; three children in that school now regarded her as a source of happiness and entertainment, and pretty things. Florence had a rival; and in the days to come the children slowly grew to feel that Miss Moss could make them have better times than Florence could, and that pleasing Miss Moss paid better than pleasing Florence. Miss Moss had no scruples of conscience in pursuing this course, for she knew that human beings have to be won to right courses of action long before they can be made to understand abstract reasons for doing right. She knew she could not win those children by preaching to them; she knew they would listen to a sermon only after they had grown to love and trust her. There were many steps to the process of readjusting the warped relations in that school. Florence gradually, and not at all gracefully, accepted her new position of plain lay member of the school, a person with no special privileges, and with no abnormal influence. The climax came at Christmas, when Miss Moss trained her little band to present a short cantata in which an angel told the news of the birth of the Babe to representatives of all the nations of the earth. The leading character was the angel, and here Miss Moss encountered a common difficulty; Florence was really the only child in school who could take the character well. The others were all too shy or too phlegmatic. Miss Moss had to choose between a pretty, successful performance, one which would bring her praise and admiration, one which the company store-keeper would report in glowing terms to the company itself, and the final success of her scheme of normal adjustment. She made the shy little Mollie Sluss the angel. Mollie stepped on the end of the sheet in which she was draped, she forgot her part twice and could never be heard at the back of the room; she lost one of her wings at an inopportune moment, and she failed most lamentably to look like an angel. She looked more like a lost soul which is too frightened even to ask the way back to its habitat. Mollie was not a shining success as an angel, but as a means to an end she did very well.