Jim thought it a very queer-looking school, with teacher and pupils all wearing warm coats, mittens, and hoods or caps, and all with their feet hidden in big woolen bags. There was no fire, of course, and all the windows were wide open.
“But what a happy-looking crowd it is!” Laura said, and the teacher answered,
“They are the happiest children I ever taught, and they learn so easily! They get on much faster than most of the children in other schools of the same grade. We give them luncheon here—plain nourishing things which the doctor orders—and,” she lowered her voice, “that means a deal to some who come from poor homes where there is not too much to eat.”
“We shall gladly pay for Jim,” Laura said quickly, “enough for him and some of the others too.”
So Jim’s outdoor life began. There was a covered porch adjoining the old nursery, and the judge had the end boarded up to protect the boy’s cot from snow or rain; and there, in a warm sleeping-bag, with a wool cap over his ears, and a little fox terrier cuddled down beside him for company, Jim slept through all the winter weather.
He and the judge were great chums now. It would be hard to say which most enjoyed the half-hour they spent together before Laura carried the boy off to bed. And as for Laura—she often wondered how she had ever gotten on without Jim. He filled the big house with life, and she didn’t at all mind the noise and disorder that he brought into it. He whistled now from morning till night, and his pockets were perfect catch-alls. Sometimes they were stuck together with chewing-gum or molasses candy, and sometimes they were soaked with wet sponges, and his hands—she counted one Saturday, thirteen times that she sent him to wash them between getting up and bedtime.
The girls always wanted Jim at their Camp Fire meetings, for a part of the time at least. As “Miss Laura’s boy” they felt that in a way he belonged to them too, and Jim was very proud and happy to make one of the company.
“I’m going to be a Camp Fire boy until I’m big enough to be a Scout, if you’ll all let me,” he told the girls one night, and they all gave him the most cordial of welcomes.
He was sitting between Olga and Elizabeth, when the girls were talking about some of the babies they had found.
“We never find one that is just right,” Rose Parsons complained. “Or if the baby is what we would like, there is always some one that wants to keep it.”