-colored group of little figures, as he stopped to fix a
strap-buckle on the school-bag of one of his pupils. And as he stood
there in the slanting afternoon sunlight surrounded by his charges he
suddenly made me think of the tall old priest in Sorolla's _Triste
Herencia_ surrounded by his waifs. I caught the echo of something
benignant and Lincoln-like from that raw-boned figure in the
big-lensed eye-glasses and the clothes that didn't quite fit him. And
my respect for Gershom went up like a Chinook-fanned thermometer. He
took those children of his seriously. He liked them. He was trying to
give them the best that was in him. And that solemn purpose saved him,
redeemed him, ennobled his baldness just as it ennobled the baldness
of the four-square little frame building behind him. I don't know why
it was, but for some reason or other that picture of the northern
prairie and the gaunt school-teacher surrounded by his pupils in the
thinning afternoon sunlight became memorable to me. It photographed
itself on my mind, not sharply, but softened with a fringing prism of
feeling, like a picture taken with what camera-men call a
"soft-focus." It touched my heart, in some way, and threatened to
bring a choke up into my foolish old throat.

It was Pauline Augusta who saw me first. She came toward the car with
her strapped school-books and her lunch-box in her hand and a prim
little smile on her slightly freckled face. She impressed me as a
startingly shabby figure, in the old sealskin coat which I had made
over for her, worn clean to the hide along the front, for even those
early autumn days found a chill in the air when the sun began to get
low. She had just climbed in beside me when I caught sight of Dinkie.
I saw him come down the school-steps, stuffing something into the
pocket of his reefer-jacket as he came. He looked startlingly tall,
for a boy of his years. He seemed deep in thought. There was, indeed,
an air of remoteness about him which for a moment rather startled me,
an air of belonging, not to me, but to the world into which he was
peering with such ardent young eyes. Then he caught sight of me, and
at the same moment his face both lightened and brightened. He came
toward the car quietly, none the less, and with that slightly sidewise
twist of the body which overtakes him in his occasional moments of
embarrassment, for it was plain that he stood averse to any undue
display of emotion before his playmates. He merely