cause was the unoffending but
offensive gold fish. For three days it had preached its silent sermon of
sedition and puzzled the olfactory nerves of Miss Blake, who after ten
years of East Side teaching had flattered herself that she was beyond
any new sensation of that nature. After a heated interview which led to
the disintegration of the venerable corse, Miss Blake gathered her black
serge draperies closely about her and issued her command.

"Take your things," said she; "I won't have you in this room another
minute." Patrick's eyes grew large, he hesitated about returning to the
paternal and official roof-tree with the tidings that he had been
expelled. "Take your hat and everything you own and come with me."

Patrick gathered together a miscellaneous collection, consisting of a
wad of chewing-gum, the soul of a mouth-organ, a cap, and one rubber
overshoe, and prepared to march upon East Broadway.

"You are a disgrace to the school," said Miss Blake loftily, "and I am
going to take you to the only place you are fit for--back to the First
Reader Class. We'll see what Miss Bailey will say to you, young man."

Well, Patrick followed her. It was the first command of hers to which he
had given favorable ear. He even went with alacrity--and the novices in
the Second Reader gazed wildly upon one another. They may not have been
quick to memorize incomprehensible and unexplained "memory gems," or to
carry in their heads long strings of figures unconnected with anything
in sea or sky. But Miss Bailey's training had made them experts in
recognizing cause and effect, and such an epidemic of lawlessness and
mischief swept over Room 19 as even Miss Blake's ten years' experience
had never paralleled. "Bailey's Babies" went suddenly and unanimously to
the dogs. The energy which they had expended in being "'moted" was as
nothing to the delirious determination with which they fought for
retrogradation. They dutifully called to mind all Miss Bailey's
precepts, and then crashed through them, one by one. They fell from
grace, from truth, from cleanliness, from all the moral heights upon
which Teacher had perched them, and, as they fell, they set in motion
the machinery provided by the Board of Education. Mesdames Gonorowsky,
Mowgelewsky and Borrachsohn, and other matrons began to find the tenor
of their days interrupted by incomprehensible post-cards, and a
regrettably comprehensible Truant Officer. "Bailey's Babies" were
running amuc