I am thinking, there
was last winter, besides the day school of some four hundred pupils, an
evening class of big factory girls, most of them women grown, that vividly
illustrated the difficulties that beset teaching in the Bohemian quarter.
It had been got together with much difficulty by the principal and one of
the officers of the Society, who gave up his nights and his own home life
to the work of instructing the school. On the night when it opened, he was
annoyed by a smell of tobacco in the hallways and took the janitor to task
for smoking in the building. The man denied the charge, and Mr. H---- went
hunting through the house for the offender with growing indignation, as he
found the teachers in the class-rooms sneezing and sniffing the air to
locate the source of the infliction. It was not until later in the
evening, when the sneezing fit took him too as he was bending over a group
of the girls to examine their slates, that he discovered it to be a
feature of the new enterprise. The perfume was part of the school. Without
it, it could not go on. The girls were all cigar makers; so were their
parents at home. The shop and the tenement were organized on the tobacco
plan, and the school must needs adopt it with what patience it could, if
its business were to proceed.

It did, and got on fairly well until a reporter found his way into it and
roused the resentment of the girls by some inconsiderate, if well-meant,
criticisms of their ways. The rebellion he caused was quelled with
difficulty by Mr. H----, who re-established his influence over them at
this point and gained their confidence by going to live among them in the
school-house with his family. Still the sullen moods, the nightly
ructions. The girls were as ready to fight as to write, in their fits of
angry spite, until my friend was almost ready to declare with the angry
Irishman, that he would have peace in the house if he had to whip all
hands to get it. Christmas was at hand with its message of peace and
good-will, but the school was more than usually unruly, when one night, in
despair, he started to read a story to them to lay the storm. It was Hans
Christian Andersen's story of the little girl who sold matches and lighted
her way to mother and heaven with them as she sat lonely and starved,
freezing to death in the street on New Year's eve. As match after match
went out with the pictures of home, of warmth, and brightness it had shown
the child, and her