“I couldn’t see quite how to go about the cake business,” Miss Belle commented, “because they were particularly proud of it. Finally, though, I hit on an idea. One of the women in the neighborhood was sick. She was a good cook and knew good cooking when she saw it, so I got my sister to make an angel cake, which I took around to her. I do believe it was the first light cake she had ever tasted—anyway, she was tickled to death. It wasn’t long after that before every one who could afford to do it was making angel food. Of course it’s expensive, but since they were bound to make cake, that was a lot better than the other.”
Similar tactics gradually replaced the fried meats by roasts and stews. When Miss Belle came, meat swam in fat while it cooked and came from the stove loaded with grease. Everybody fried meat, and when by chance they bought a roast they began by boiling all of the juice out of it before they put it in the oven. Miss Belle’s stews and roasts made better eating, though. The men-folks liked them hugely and the old frying process was doomed.
“No,” concluded Miss Belle, laughingly, “you can’t do a thing with the old folks. Why if I was to go into a kitchen belonging to one of those women and tell her how to sift flour she would run me out quick, but when Annie comes home and makes such muffins that the man of the family eats eleven the first time, there is no way to answer back. The muffins speak for themselves.”
IV Taking the Boys in Hand
While the girls were making over the diet of the neighborhood Miss Belle was working through the boys to improve the strains of corn used by the farmers, the methods of fertilizing and the quality of the truck patches. A few years ago when the farmer scorned newfangled ideas it was the boys that took home methods for numbering and testing each ear of corn to determine whether or not the kernels on it would sprout when they were planted. The farmer who turns a deaf ear to argument can offer no effective reply to a corn-tester in which only one kernel in three has sprouted. The ears are infertile, from one cause or another, and the sooner he replaces them by fertile seed the better for his corn crop.
Out beside a white limestone pike stands the school in which Miss Belle has done her work. One would hardly stop to look at it, because it differs in no way from thousands of similar country school-houses. Modest and unassuming, like Miss Belle, it holds only one feature of real interest—the faces of the children. Bright, eager, enthusiastic, they labor earnestly over their lessons in order that they may get at their “busy work,” and linger over their “busy work” during recess and after school, because it glides so swiftly from their deft fingers. In this, as in everything else which she does, Miss Belle has a system. The child whose lessons are not done, and done up to a certain grade, is not taught new stitches or new designs. Even the youngest responds to the stimulus, and the little girl in a pink frock, with pink ribbons on her brown pig-tails, lays aside the mat she is making to write “Annie Belle Lewis” on the board, and to tell you that she is seven; while John Murphy, of the mature age of eleven, stops crocheting ear-mufflers for a moment to tell you what he is doing and why he does it.
V “Busy Work” as an Asset
“You never would guess what a help the ‘busy work’ is,” smiled Miss Belle. “You see, they never can do it until their lessons are finished, so they are as good at arithmetic as they are at patching. Then I always teach the little ones patterns and stitches where they have to count, ‘One, two, three, four, five, and drop one,’ you know, and in the shortest time they learn their number work. It seems to go so much more quickly when they do it in connection with some pieces that they can see. But you never would guess the best thing the sewing has done—it has stopped gossiping. It’s hard to believe, I know, but it’s true. There used to be a lot of trouble in this neighborhood. People told tales, there was ill feeling, and folks quarreled a great deal of the time. It wasn’t long before I found out that it was the girls who did most of the tale-bearing. No wonder, either! They weren’t very busy in school, and they had nothing much to do at home except to listen and talk. Really, they hadn’t any decent interest in life. Of course there was no use in saying anything, but I felt that if I could get them busy at something they liked they would stop talking. It wasn’t enough to start them at dressmaking, either, but when I started in on hard, fancy work designs I had them. They made pretty clothes, embroidered them; made lace and doilies. Most of the girls can pick up a new Irish-lace pattern from a fashion-book as easily as I can, and they are rabid for new patterns. The same girls who did most of the tale-bearing are busy at work, and I find them swapping patterns and recipes instead of stories.”
While the girls patch, darn, crochet, hem, knit, weave baskets, make garments and do the various kinds of “busy work,” the boys clean the school yard, plant walnut trees—Mrs. Faulconer, the County Superintendent, is having the school children plant nut trees along all the pikes—and do anything else which is not beneath their dignity. “They have no work benches,” lamented Miss Belle, “I hope they will get them soon, although there is really no place to put them.” Indeed, in a little building packed with fifty children and the school-room furniture the space is narrow.
Yet this little one-room building at Locust Grove has left such a mark on the community that when the County School Board recently decided to transfer Miss Belle to a larger school the member from her district promptly resigned, and refused to be placated until every other member of the board had apologized to him and promised to leave Miss Belle in his school.