“Never in my life,” the teacher said, “had I seen Andy clean. I made up my mind that for once he should have a clean body as well as clean clothes.”
When Andy came that Christmas eve, the teacher took him into a room where there were towels, soap, a basin, and a new outfit of clothes.
“Andy,” she said, “this is your Christmas present from my friend, and now you are going to give me a Christmas present, too. You are going to wash up and dress up.”
Andy followed directions, and when he emerged from the room in his spick and span outfit, his hat set side-wise on his wet, newly combed hair, he stood up very straight, surveying himself as best he could from head to foot, and exclaimed,—“Gee! I feel just like George Washington.” The bath and the new suit were a realization of his highest ideal.
“Andy and I were always friends after that,” said the teacher, “and since Andy was the moving spirit among the boys in the village, the boys and I got along well together. It was my introduction to the heart of the community, and it came with Andy’s realization of an ideal which he had long cherished.”
IX A Step Toward Good Health
Having won Andy over, the teacher prepared to work her way past some of the barriers of prejudice which the community had placed between itself and civilization. The girls offered the readiest opening.
“The homes were wretched,” the teacher said. “The people did not know the simplest health rules. They were strangers to sanitation or cleanliness. Their housekeeping was primitive and their cooking miserable. I had won the boys by getting them together in something that resembled a club. I decided that my best path to the girls, and from them to the community, lay through housekeeping.”
The hypothesis was, at least, worthy of a try-out. The teacher began by keeping her own house in the most approved manner, and asking the girls to come in and help her do it.
“You’ll like to take supper with me this evening,” she would say to a group of girls at recess time. “Speak to your mothers when you go home, and you, Sadie and Annie, will stay over night and sleep in the spare bed.”