Forty immature minds--minds just groping on the threshold of life--to be watched, shaped, and helped for ten months, and their individual needs treated with sympathy and patience. For ten months--the school term,--then to be exchanged for a new batch, and so from year to year. Glendale’s manufacturing population included several nationalities, so that the little army of scholars which sat under Miss Willis’s eye included Poles, Italians, negroes, and now and then a youthful Chinaman, as well as the sons and daughters of the merchant, the tailor, the butcher, and baker, and other citizens whose title as Americans was of older date. It was not easy to keep the atmosphere of such a school-room wholesome, for the apparel of the poorest children, though often well darned, was not always clean, and the ventilating apparatus represented a political job. But it was Miss Willis’s pride that she knew the identity of every one of her boys and girls, and carried it by force of love and will written on her brain as well as on the desk-tablets which she kept as a safeguard against possible lapses of memory. She loved her classes, and it was a grief to her at first to be obliged to pass them on at the end of the school year. But habit reconciles us to the inevitable, and she presently learned to steel her heart against a too sensitive point of view in this respect, and to supplement the bleeding ties thus rudely severed with a fresh set without crying her eyes out. Yet though faithful teachers are thus schooled to forget, they rarely do, and Miss Willis found herself keeping track, in her mind’s eye, of her little favorites--some of them youthful reprobates--in their progress up the ladder of knowledge and out into the world.