And you’ll look—and see—he’s my brother!
And you’ll sing, “Little Mary was true.”
NURSERY TILES. —THE SHEPHERD BOY.
HOW PATTY CURTIS LEARNED TO SWEEP.
BY MRS. M. L. EVANS.
NOWADAYS nearly every school-room is furnished with a waste-paper basket, dust-pan and brush, with which the pupils are expected to keep the room tidy. But in the days when Patty Curtis went to school in the old brick school-house in Sagetown, such luxuries were unheard of, and the school-room during the greater part of the day was a haven for dirt—rather clean dirt it was, but it answered the definition which says, “Dirt is matter out of place.”
Certainly the school-room floor was no place for the scraps of paper over which Patty industriously scribbled with her stubby lead-pencil, but it was there she dropped them without thought of wrong-doing or idea of further responsibility for her manuscript fragments. Cores of haws and crab-apples, and shells of “pig-nuts” found the same resting place, and soiled slate-rags were in such abundance as would have delighted the heart of any “old rag man;” during flower season, too, a desk proudly adorned with fresh flowers in the morning meant a floor sadly strewed with wilted, trodden fragments in the afternoon, and over all this litter was plentifully sprinkled the dust of the earth. Of this we are all supposed to be made, and it needs but little faith to believe that children are made of it, when one sees, in a school-room, the quantity of it they can kick off their feet, and shake out of their jackets and skirts.