"From Smith College," the farmer replied, unexpectedly. "This is her second year of teaching our school." The school-teacher arrived late in the afternoon. My landlady was "expecting" her; so was I, no less eagerly. "Why were you interested in me?" she inquired, when, on further acquaintance, I confessed this to her. "Because, with a training that fits you for work in a carefully graded school or a college, you chose to teach here. Why did you?" "For three reasons," she answered. "Country life is better for my health than city life; the people around here are thoroughly awake to the importance of education; and the children--they are such dears! You must see them when school opens." I did see them then. Also, I saw them before that time. When the news of their teacher's arrival reached them, they came "by two, and threes, and fuller companies" to welcome her. They ranged in age from a boy and a girl of fifteen to two little girls of six. Each and every one was rapturously glad to see the teacher; they all brought her small gifts, and all of them bore messages from their homes, comprising a score of invitations to supper, the loan of a tent for the remainder of the mild weather, and the offer of a "lift" to and from school on stormy days. The teacher accepted these tributes as a matter of course. She was genuinely glad to see her old pupils. In her turn, she sent messages to their several homes, and gave into the children's hands tokens she had purposely gathered together for them. "We'll meet on Monday at the school-house," she finally said; and the children, instantly responding to the implied suggestion, bade her good-bye, and went running down the dusty road. Each one of them lived at least a mile away; many of them more than two miles. On Monday I accompanied the teacher to school. The school-house was a small, one-roomed, wooden building. It contained little besides a few rows of desks and benches for the children, two or three maps, and blackboards, a tiny closet filled with worn books, the teacher's desk, and a coal stove. But it had windows on three sides, and was set down in the midst of a grassy meadow bordered with a stone wall. There were fourteen pupils. They were all assembled in the school-yard when we arrived. The boys were playing baseball, and the girls, perched on the stone wall, were watching them. The moment they saw the teacher boys and girls alike came to escort her to her place in the school- house. When she was in it, they took their own places--those they had occupied during the former term. There was one "new" pupil, a small boy. He had been so frequently a "visiting scholar" the previous year that his newness was not very patent. There was a desk that he also claimed as his. "We will sing 'America,'" were the words with which the teacher commenced the new school year, "and then we will go on with our work, beginning where we left off in the spring."