One rule of the moving picture hall delights us dogs greatly. No trainer of animals can ever exhibit his creatures there. That is in the charter.
One good-sized room in the hall was reserved for a school for the children of the village, and Mrs. Waverlee is their teacher.
To come back to Czarina. She says that if all children in Russia could have such a teacher as Mrs. Waverlee, there would not be so much misery among them. She says that in her country, great pains is taken with the education of the children of the rich. They are made to speak French, and if a child forgets and addresses the mother in Russian, he or she is made to say the sentence over again in French, and sometimes in English, for they have governesses and nurses of different nationalities.
“In this wonderful country of America,” says Czarina, “you educate everybody. I was amazed to see a little Russian Jewess with her arms round Mrs. Waverlee’s neck the other day. In her own country, the child would be kept down, and if she had a teacher, would not dare to embrace her. Imagine the delight of her parents, at having a rich, cultured woman like Mrs. Waverlee devoting herself to the education of their child.”
All the dogs love Mrs. Waverlee, but Gringo is her stoutest admirer, partly on account of the English blood in his veins, and he often runs down to her school and calls on her, or visits her in the pretty cottage in which she lives with Egbert.
She welcomes any well-behaved dog to her school, and the other day Gringo and I sauntered down to the village and approached Neighbourhood Hall.
It was a lovely day, and the doors were all wide open. We trotted across the tennis court, and the place where the boys and girls play basket-ball, to the garden at the back of the hall.
There is a big patch of greensward there, with a pond in the middle, where some white ducks, pets of the children, are always paddling about.