The task of the visiting teacher is plain. She must get at the facts. This she does by studying closely the child’s environment, realizing that he is the product of varied associations and influences. There are circles within circles—the home, the school, the immediate neighborhood, and what at times seems almost “beyond his ken,” the great wide world itself. No analysis of the forces that in their play and interplay tend to shape this young life would be complete that did not include the shifting, kaleidoscopic scenes amid which so often his plastic years are spent; nor would the picture be lifelike did it not show upon its face the changes that are wrought through that remoter contact with men and things. The action followed depends naturally upon what the investigation reveals. Should the home be at fault, then an effort is made to remove the “trouble maker,” and, should this be impossible, then effort is made at least to effect some compromise, the benefit of which the child will reap both in the home and in the school. Margaret had many times struck a discordant note in the classroom. At home she had always had her own way. Small wonder, then, that she played the prank she did in the assembly. In the midst of the gathering of some five hundred children when the morning exercises were being held, she spoke loud enough to be disturbing, and when reprimanded and told to leave the hall, she walked its full length on her heels, thus creating a greater disturbance and openly defying the principal’s authority. She was sent home and the matter was explained to her parents. The child felt that she had been insulted because ordered from the room, and the mother, unfortunately, took her side. At first she could not be made to see that if her child saw fit to leave the hall as she chose, the other 499 might use their wits to the same end and pandemonium result. Only after repeated interviews with the visiting teacher and after the child had lost fully a month of school did the mother allow her to return. Sometimes it happens that the child has neither time nor place to study. “The noise, it gets me all mixed up,” is her pathetic comment. The neighborhood is scoured till a quiet room is found, either in a settlement, a sisterhood, or a public library, and then the mother’s co-operation is enlisted and many times secured when she understands that noise, interruptions and general disorder are not conducive to the formation of good habits of study.