You can imagine Miss Burn’s surprise when, among other gifts, she found Jim’s necklace on her desk the morning before Christmas. Realizing the value of the gift and Jim’s true devotion to her, she won from him the story of his sacrifice. She said, “Oh, Jim, you don’t know how this makes me feel,” and Jim went home at the end of the day with a beaming face. Jim’s sacrifice reacted upon himself, for this taste of his powers led him into many fair means of earning money, and so launched him well on what turned out to be a successful business career. “Making faces” is essentially a little child’s offense, although sometimes it persists in upper grades or even in the high school. CASE 85 (FOURTH GRADE) [Sidenote: “Making Faces” for Spite] In a small village there existed bad feeling between the pastor of the church and several of his leading members. Some parishioners took sides with the pastor, and in the school the children of these two church factions carried on the quarrel of their elders. The teacher kept peace on the playground through active personal supervision, but in school he encountered the face-making problem in a degree only less ridiculous than it was annoying. There existed an active emulation in the ugliness of the facial contortions produced, and when a member of one faction had made a particularly horrid grimace, he looked for and received the silent applause of his sympathizers. Charles Briggs was the teacher. He knew that the feeling of alliance in the members of the factions was the cause of the face-making epidemic, but he could not at first think of a logical way of meeting the situation. He tried, first, the use of his absolute authority. He forbade the making of faces, and punished the children when he caught them at it. Whereupon face-making became a more exciting sport than ever, since the zest of escaping notice was added to the pleasure of presenting an ugly front to the enemy. Mr. Briggs said, “How funny you would all look if your faces should stay twisted into those grotesque shapes.” Nevertheless the children spent their recesses, when kept in, in inventing new twists and contortions; they stood in corners and drew the attention of the whole room to fresh triumphs in grotesqueness. The evil grew, because the cause was not touched. One boy even set a looking-glass up in front of his book, into which he made faces for the benefit of the girl who sat behind him, keeping his head lowered meanwhile as if using his handkerchief to wipe his tearful eyes.