Mrs. Green peeped in and saw the sun shining on Rosaleen's primrose head. She was stringing beads, while Bobby, Pat and Aaron knelt beside her, palpitating for a chance to serve.
"She's real cute!" whispered Mrs. Green. "Does Bobby act very often like he's doin' now?"
"He's one of the greatest comforts of my life!" I said truly.
"I wish I could say the same!" she retorted. "Well, I came round intendin' to give him a good settlin' but he'd had two already this week and I guess I'll let it go! We ain't so poverty-struck as some o' the folks in this neighborhood and I guess we can make out to spare a chair, it's little enough to pay for gettin' rid of Bobby."
Two years that miracle of beauty and sweetness, Rosaleen Clancy stayed with us, just as potent an influence as the birds or the flowers, the stories I told, or the music I coaxed from the little upright piano. Her face was not her only fortune for she had a heart of gold. Ireland did indeed have a grievance when Rosaleen left it for America!
This is just a corner of my portrait gallery, which has dozens of other types hanging on the walls clamoring to be described. Some were lovely and some interestingly ugly; some were like lilies growing out of the mud, others had not been quite as able to energize themselves out of their environment and bore the sad traces of it ever with them;—still, they were all absorbingly interesting beyond my power to paint. Month after month they sat together, working, playing, helping, growing—in a word learning how to live, and there in the midst of the group was I, learning my life lesson with them.
The study and the practice of the kindergarten theory of education and of life gave me, while I was still very young, a certain ideal by which to live and work, and it has never faded.—Never, whether richer or poorer, whether better or worse, in sickness or in health, in prosperity or adversity, never wholly to lose my glimpse of that "celestial light" that childhood-apparalled "Meadow, grove and stream, the earth and every common sight:" and to hold that attitude of mind and heart which gives to life even when it is difficult something of "the glory and the freshness of a dream!"
