n the boy's generosity, and in the evenings
together they, with Margaret's assistance, wrestled with the
bewildering intricacies of arithmetical problems. Her open confession
of helplessness, and her heroic attempts to overcome her defects, made
irresistible appeal to the chivalrous heart of the little Highland
gentleman. Thenceforth he was her champion for all that was in him.

But the teacher's weakness in mathematics was atoned for, if atonement
there be for such a weakness, by the ample strength of her endowments in
those branches of learning in which imagination and artistic sensibility
play any large part. And a far larger part, and far more important,
do these Divine gifts play than many wise educationists conceive. The
lessons in history, in geography, and in reading ceased to be mere
memory tasks and became instinct with life. The whole school would stay
its ordinary work to listen while the teacher told tales of the brave
days of old to the history class, or transformed the geography lessons
into excursions among people of strange tongues dwelling in far lands.
But it was in the reading lessons that her artistic talents had full
play. The mere pronouncing and spelling of words were but incidents
in the way of expression of thought and emotion. After a whole week of
drilling which she would give to a single lesson, she would arrest
the class with the question, "What is the author seeing?" and with the
further question, "How does he try to show it to us?" Reading, to her,
consisted in the ability to see what the author saw and the art of
telling it, and to set forth with grace that thing in the author's
words.

In the writing class her chief anxiety was to avoid blots. Every blot
might become an occasion of humiliation to teacher and pupils alike.
"Oh, this will never do! They must not see this!" she would cry, rubbing
out with infinite care and pains the blot, and rubbing in the horror
of such a defilement being paraded before the eyes of the vague but
terrible "they."

Thus the pathway trodden in the school routine was, perchance, neither
wide nor far extended, but it was thoroughly well trodden. As a
consequence, when the day for the closing exercises came around both
teacher and pupils had become so thoroughly familiar with the path and
so accustomed to the vision of the onlooking public that they faced the
ordeal without dread, prepared to give forth whatever of knowledge or
accomplishment they might pos