Just as though Miss Georgiana were a fairy god-mother who struck her crutch upon the platform and cried: "Se sesame! change!" the young pirates often came through Miss Georgiana's hands and entered high school with the reputation of being very decent fellows after all.
Nor was Miss Georgiana a "softie"; far from it. Ask the boys themselves about it? Oh! they would merely hang their heads, and scrape a foot back and forth on the rug, and grunt: "Aw! Miss Shipman understands a fellow."
Her influence over the girls was even greater. She expected you to learn your lessons, and if you were lazy she spent infinite pains in urging you on. And if you did not work, Miss Georgiana felt aggrieved, and that made any nice girl feel dreadfully mean! Besides, you took up more of the teacher's time than you had any right to, and the other girls declared it was not fair, and talked pretty harshly about you.
If Miss Georgiana had to remain after school for any reason, more than half of her girls would be sure to hang around the school entrance until she came out, and then they all trailed home with her.
When you saw a bevy of girls from twelve to fourteen years of age, or thereabout, massed on one of the shady walks of the Parade soon after school closed for the day, or chattering along Whipple Street on which Miss Georgiana Shipman lived, you might be sure that the teacher of the sixth grade, grammar, was in the center of the group.
Miss Georgiana lived with her mother—a little old lady in Quaker dress—in a small cottage back from the street-line. There were three big oaks in the front yard, and no grass ever could be coaxed to grow under them, for the girls kept it worn down to the roots.
There were seats at the roots of the three huge trees in the open season, and it was an odd afternoon indeed that did not find a number of girls here. To be invited to stay to tea at Miss Georgiana's was the height of every girl's ambition who belonged in Number Six.
Nor did the girls when graduated, easily forget Miss Georgiana. She had their confidence and some of them came to her with troubles and perplexities that they could have exposed to nobody else.
Of course, girls who had "understanding" mothers, did not need this special inspiration and help, but it was noticeable that girls who had no mothers at all, found in the little, plump, rather dowdy "old maid school teacher" one of those choice souls that God has put on earth to fulfil the duties of parents taken away.
Miss Georgiana Shipman had been teaching for twenty years, but she had never grown old. And her influence was—to use a trite description—like a stone flung into a still pool of water; the ever widening circles set moving by it lapped the very outer shores of Milton life.