s?"

"The children are going to be under six; we shan't have reading and
writing."

We sat down to work together, marking out and cutting brown paper
envelopes for the children's sewing or weaving, binding colored prints
with gold paper and putting them on the wall with thumb tacks, and
arranging all the kindergarten materials tidily on the shelves of the
closets. Next day was a holiday and she begged to come again. I
consented and told her that she might bring a friend if she liked and we
would lunch together.

"I guess not," she said, with just a hint of jealousy in her tone. "You
and I get on so well that mebbe we'd be bothered with another girl
messin' around, and she'd be one more to wash up for after lunch."

From that moment, the Corporal, as I called her, was a stanch ally and
there was seldom a day in the coming years when she did not faithfully
perform all sorts of unofficial duties, attaching herself passionately
to my service with the devotion of a mother or an elder sister. She
proved at the beginning a kind of travelling agent for the school
haranguing mothers on the street corners and addressing the groups of
curious children who gathered at the foot of the school steps.

"You'd ought to go upstairs and see the _inside_ of it!" she would
exclaim. "It's just like going around the world. There's a canary bird,
there's fishes swimmin' in a glass bowl, there's plants bloomin' on the
winder sills, there's a pianner, and more'n a million pictures! There's
closets stuffed full o' things to play and work with, and whatever the
scholars make they're goin' to take home if it's good. There's a
play-room with red rings painted on the floor and they're going to march
and play games on 'em. She can play the pianner standin' up or settin'
down, without lookin' at her hands to see where they're goin'. She's
goin' to wear white, two a week, and I got Miss Lannigan to wash 'em for
her for fifteen cents apiece. I tell her the children 'round here's
awful dirty and she says the cleaner she is the cleaner they'll be....
No, 'tain't goin' to be no Sunday School," said the voluble Corporal.
"No, 'tain't goin' to be no Mission; no, 'tain't goin' to be no Lodge!
She says it's a new kind of a school, that's all I know, and next
Monday'll see it goin' full blast!"

It was somewhat in this fashion, that I walked joyously into the heart
of a San Francisco slum, and began experimenting with my newly-learned
panaceas.

These w