Here, as everywhere, it is the personal influence of the teacher that counts for most in dealing with the child. It follows it into the home, and often through life to the second and third generation, smoothing the way of trouble and sorrow and hardship with counsel and aid in a hundred ways. "Sometimes," says one of the teachers, who has seen the children of her first pupils go from her school into their own homes to take up the battle of life, "sometimes a teacher, while conducting a class, is also fashioning, from some soft white material, a shroud for some little one whose parents can provide none themselves. When a child dies of a disease that is not contagious, its classmates gather around the coffin and sing in German or English, 'I am Jesus's little lamb.' Sometimes the children's hymn and the Lord's Prayer are the only service." Her life work has been among the poorest Germans on the East Side. "Among our young men," she reports, "I know of only three who have become drunkards, and many are stanch temperance men. I have never known of one of our girls drinking to excess. I have looked carefully over our records, and can truly say that, so far as I can learn, not one girl who remained with us until over seventeen lived a life of shame." What teaching meant to this woman the statement that follows gives an idea of: "Shrove Tuesday evening is a time when all Germans plan for a frolic; they call it 'Fastnacht.' Twenty years ago I gave the young people of the evening school a party on that evening, and at the suggestion of one of the girls decided to have a reunion every year at that time. So each year our married girls and boys, and those still unmarried, who have grown beyond us in other ways, come 'home.' We sing the old songs, talk over old times, play games, drink coffee and eat doughnuts, and always end the evening with 'Auld Lang Syne.' Last spring, two of the young men stood at the stairway and counted the guests as they went to the supper-room: they reported over four hundred. Letters came from Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, Texas, Idaho, and Wyoming from those who would gladly have been with us. All who live within a radius of fifty miles try to be here."