“I really think, Mrs. Merrill,” said the teacher finally, “that your little girl is ready for the first grade. She seems very well prepared. But they don’t take new first graders so late in the year. Why don’t you keep her out of school the rest of this term and then next year, enter her in the first grade?”
Mrs. Merrill thought that was a fine plan. There would be so many new sights to see and things to learn in the city that Mary Jane would find plenty to do.
But Mary Jane was keenly disappointed. “I wanted to stay in Betty’s room,” she explained to the teacher. “She asked me to sit by her this morning, she did, and I promised yes I would.”
“Then I’ll tell you what you may do,” suggested the teacher kindly. “Two of our folks are absent this morning so we have enough chairs to go around. Wouldn’t you like to stay with Betty and visit? And then just a little before time for school to be out, Betty can take you up to your sister’s room and she can bring you home.”
Mrs. Merrill agreed that that was a fine plan, so Mary Jane went to the cloak room to hang up her hat and her mother hurried back home.
At first Mary Jane felt very strange in the new school room. There were so many children there and the songs were new and the games were new and everything seemed different. She almost—not really, but almost—wished she had gone home with her mother. And then, after singing three songs Mary Jane didn’t know, the children made a big circle and let Mary Jane stand in the middle and they sang the song Mary Jane knew so very well,
“I went to visit a friend to-day, She only lives across the way, She said she couldn’t come out to play Because it was her ——”
Quick as a flash Mary Jane dropped onto her knees and began to act out packing things into a box.
For a minute the children hesitated. That was a strange thing to be acting; Mary Jane was not washing or ironing or churning or sweeping or any of the things the children usually acted and they were all puzzled. Then suddenly Betty remembered the back stairway and all the piles of boxes and excelsior on Mary Jane’s back stairway and she called out the end of the song—“because it was her moving day!” And everybody finished the verse with a flourish.
After that Mary Jane felt more at home and the morning went oh, so very quickly, till recess time, when they all went out into the big yard to play in the sunshine.