that just what she
had been looking for in her mind?

Jennie wired to her southerner for the number of his party, and secured
automobiles for the trip. She sent a note to Jim Irwin telling of the
prospective visitation. She would show all concerned that she could do
some things, anyhow, and she would send these people on with a good
impression of her county.

She was glad of the automobiles the next Monday morning, when at
nine-thirty the train discharged upon her a dozen very alert, very
up-to-date, very inquisitive southerners, male and female, most of whom
seemed to have left their "r's" in the gulf region. It was eleven when the
party parked their machines before the schoolhouse door.

"There are visitors here before us," said Jennie.

"Seems rather like an educational shrine," said Doctor Brathwayt, of
Mississippi. "How does he accommodate so many visitors in that small
edifice?"

"I am not aware," said Jennie, "that he has been in the habit of receiving
so very many from outside the district. Well, shall we go in?"

Once inside, Jennie felt a queer return of her old aversion to Jim's
methods--the aversion which had caused her to criticize him so sharply on
the occasion of her first visit. The reason for the return of the feeling
lay in the fact that the work going on was of the same sort, but of a more
intense character. It was so utterly unlike a school as Jennie understood
the word, that she glanced back at the group of educators with a little
blush. The school was in a sort of uproar. Not that uproar of boredom and
mischief of which most of us have familiar memories, but a sort of eager
uproar, in which every child was intensely interested in the same thing;
and did little rustling things because of this interest; something like
the hum at a football game or a dog-fight.

On one side of the desk stood Jim Irwin, and facing him was a smooth
stranger of the old-fashioned lightning-rod-agent type--the shallower and
laxer sort of salesman of the kind whose sole business is to get
signatures on the dotted line, and let some one else do the rest. In
short, he was a "closer."

Standing back of him in evident distress was Mr. Cornelius Bonner, and
grouped about were Columbus Brown, B. B. Hamm, Ezra Bronson, A. B. Talcott
and two or three others from outside the Woodruff District. With envelopes
in their hands and the light of battle in their eyes stood Newton Bronson,
Raymond Simms, Bettina Hansen, Mary Smith