occasion. With this point I have naught to do. But history is
history, and facts must be duly recorded; and the fact is, Miss Stone
went to St. Louis, as before stated, and let out the job of being
fashioned into a Kindergarten, to certain persons who dwelt in that
city, and whose business it was to do just this sort of thing.

Neither can it be here set down what her ultimate success might have
been had she confined herself to Kindergarten work proper. Indeed, it
is an open question how any one ever succeeded in this particular way,
or, in fact, whether any one ever did do Kindergarten work proper for a
week at a time. It is one of the peculiarities of this kind, that it
is never met with in all its purity. Like the old-fashioned
milk-sickness, you can never come to the place where it really exists.
Any one can tell you just where you will find it, but when you pursue
it, and come to the place, like the end of the rainbow, it evades you
and goes beyond.

But this is getting on slowly. Miss Stone got on slowly, too.

This was the woman to whom "Dodd" committed himself, in the words of
the last chapter. The lady turned towards the boy and brought the full
force of her smile to bear upon his luckless head.

"My dear little child," she said, "go and clean your feet!"

This, vocally. In mental reservation she remarked at the same time:
"Drat the little villain, I've got to take him at last," for she had
heard of "Dodd" and his exploits before she had been in her place a
week.

"I don't haf to," returned the youth, scraping a piece of black loam
off his left boot with the toe of his right, and rubbing the sticky
lump into the floor.

But Miss Stone had faith in her training. She hastily ran through all
the precepts and maxims of Froebel, and also such others as his
American followers have added by way of perfecting this highly wrought
system, but though she thought a great deal more rapidly than usual,
she found no rules and regulations duly made and provided for a case
just like this.

For the first time in her life she realized that there was one thing in
this world that even a German specialist, backed up by St. Louis
philosophy, had not reached; neither Froebel nor his followers said a
word about poking mud off one boot with the toe of the other, nor of
rubbing mud into the floor, nor what to do with a saucy little boy who
said defiantly, "I don't haf to."

Had she been teaching in a large city she m