Neither can it be here set down what her ultimate success might have been had she confined herself to Kindergarten work proper. Indeed, it is an open question how any one ever succeeded in this particular way, or, in fact, whether any one ever did do Kindergarten work proper for a week at a time. It is one of the peculiarities of this kind, that it is never met with in all its purity. Like the old-fashioned milk-sickness, you can never come to the place where it really exists. Any one can tell you just where you will find it, but when you pursue it, and come to the place, like the end of the rainbow, it evades you and goes beyond.
But this is getting on slowly. Miss Stone got on slowly, too.
This was the woman to whom "Dodd" committed himself, in the words of the last chapter. The lady turned towards the boy and brought the full force of her smile to bear upon his luckless head.
"My dear little child," she said, "go and clean your feet!"
This, vocally. In mental reservation she remarked at the same time: "Drat the little villain, I've got to take him at last," for she had heard of "Dodd" and his exploits before she had been in her place a week.
"I don't haf to," returned the youth, scraping a piece of black loam off his left boot with the toe of his right, and rubbing the sticky lump into the floor.
But Miss Stone had faith in her training. She hastily ran through all the precepts and maxims of Froebel, and also such others as his American followers have added by way of perfecting this highly wrought system, but though she thought a great deal more rapidly than usual, she found no rules and regulations duly made and provided for a case just like this.
For the first time in her life she realized that there was one thing in this world that even a German specialist, backed up by St. Louis philosophy, had not reached; neither Froebel nor his followers said a word about poking mud off one boot with the toe of the other, nor of rubbing mud into the floor, nor what to do with a saucy little boy who said defiantly, "I don't haf to."
Had she been teaching in a large city she might have sent for the principal, and he might have telephoned the superintendent, who might have called a meeting of the Board to consider the case, and so overcome the dilemma; but Circleville had a school of only three rooms, and the principal, so called, heard twenty-two recitations a day, in his own room, and had little time for anything else. So there was no help from that quarter, and for the time Miss Stone was dumb.
There is a tradition that her smile left her for a moment, but the fact is not well authenticated and should not be too freely believed.