Of course I felt sure that Miss Pepper was in earnest and meant to do good, but I suspected that she had not what my uncle called “a gift” with children, and I saw how much harder it made it for Bessie, who really was a natural teacher, and who contrived to rule with a steady but gracious firmness, and to win with a sweet simplicity that explained itself to the minds of little ones.

I wondered not a little at her infatuation on the Pepper question when I saw how contrary their ways and influence were.  There were plenty of nice, interesting little girls among the two hundred, and some very well-behaved boys too; but Bessie set herself to win the unruly, and it was a lesson to thoughtless me to see her do it.  One terrible little soul, with a thin, wiry body and tight-cropped head, fell into a conflict with a square-set, hard-faced boy, and they rolled under the seats together just as Miss Pepper had succeeded in raising the ill-used Joseph out of the pit with words of three syllables.  Bessie went to the rescue, and separated and inverted the combatants, only the soles of whose boots had been visible a moment before.  She sat down with them, and although I could not hear her words, I saw that they were slowly smoothing the angry creases of both the thin and the square face.

“Then let him stop a-callin’ me ‘Skinny,’” was the last outbreak of the injured lean one, and his antagonist confessed—­

“I won’t say nothin’ to you no more if you stop grinning ‘Flathead’ at me.”

Before Miss Pepper had succeeded in describing the paraphernalia of Eastern travel and the approach of the Ishmaelites, the two were induced to shake hands silently across their gentle mediatrix, whose face suddenly grew radiant with the sweetest blush I ever saw as the door opened and a new feature was added to the scene.

I do not mean to detract from the good impulses or high motives of my dear girl when I say that this was the key that opened the subject to me, and made it bright and plain.  It wore the form of a truly good and good-looking young gentleman, who had just enough of the clergyman in his appearance to show that he honored his holy calling above all things.  He gave Bessie a glance that set my heart at rest—­for I naturally felt anxious that the blush and brightness and other signs should not be thrown away on an unappreciative object—­and then he went right into his work.  Oh dear! what a difference!  One could not imagine, without seeing for one’s self, what a beautiful sympathy could do with material that a hard, dry purpose could only irritate.  Of course he bowed to me, and met Miss Pepper like an old friend, and then he began, and in beginning caught every single wandering mind, and held it with that mysterious fascination which individualizes, and convinces each one that he is the particular soul addressed.