Project Gutenberg's The Girl and the Kingdom, by Kate Douglas Wiggin

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Title: The Girl and the Kingdom
Learning to Teach

Author: Kate Douglas Wiggin

Release Date: September 11, 2007 [EBook #22578]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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The Girl and the Kingdom

_LEARNING TO TEACH_

_WRITTEN BY_

KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN

[Illustration]

Presented to the Los Angeles City Teachers Club to Create an Educational
Fund to Be Used in Part for the Literacy Campaign of The California
Federation of Women's Clubs

_Cover Designed by_ Miss Neleta Hain

* * * * *

[Illustration: Kate Douglas Wiggin]

* * * * *

The Girl and the Kingdom

_LEARNING TO TEACH_

A long, busy street in San Francisco. Innumerable small shops lined it
from north to south; horse cars, always crowded with passengers, hurried
to and fro; narrow streets intersected the broader one, these built up
with small dwellings, most of them rather neglected by their owners. In
the middle distance other narrow streets and alleys where taller houses
stood, and the windows, fire escapes, and balconies of these, added
great variety to the landscape, as the families housed there kept most
of their effects on the outside during the long dry season.

Still farther away were the roofs, chimneys and smoke stacks of mammoth
buildings--railway sheds, freight depots, power houses and the
like--with finally a glimpse of docks and wharves and shipping. This, or
at least a considerable section of it, was the kingdom. To the ordinary
beholder it might have looked ugly, crowded, sordid, undesirable, but it
appeared none of these things to the lucky person who had been invested
with some sort of modest authority in its affairs.

The throne from which the lucky person viewed the empire was humble
enough. It was the highest of the tin shop st