"I made mention last year about your fine work in basketry, and am glad

to do so again. I like your teacher's idea of utilizing native

material, corn husk, dried grasses and reeds, all from our own Garden

Spot, and a few colored strands of raffia from Madagascar, and forming

them into baskets. This faculty of using apparently useless material

and fashioning from it a useful and beautiful article is one of our

Pennsylvania Dutch heritages and one we should cherish and develop.

"I understand there has been some adverse criticism among a few of the

less liberal patrons of the community in regard to the basket work and

nature study Miss Reist is teaching. Oh, I suppose we must expect that!

Progress is always hampered by sluggish stupidity and contrariness. We

who can see into the future and read the demands of the times must

surely note that the children must be taught more than the knowledge

contained between the covers of our school books. The teacher who can

instil into the hearts of her pupils a feeling of kinship with the wild

creatures of the fields and woods, who can waken in the children an

appreciation of the beauty and symmetry of the flowers, even the weeds,

and at the same time not fail in her duty as a teacher of arithmetic,

history, and so forth, is a real teacher who has the proper conception

of her high calling and is conscientiously striving to carry that

conception into action.

"Directors, let me make this public statement to you, that in Miss

Reist you have a teacher well worthy of your heartiest cooperation. The

danger with us who have been out of school these thirty years or more

is that we expect to see the antiquated methods of our own school days

in operation to-day. We would have the schools stand still while the

whole world moves.

"I feel it is only just to commend a teacher's work when it deserves

commendation, as I consider it my duty to point out the flaws and name

any causes for regret I may discover in her teaching. In this school I

have found one big cause for regret---"

The hard eyes of Mr. Mertzheimer flashed. All through the glowing

praise of the County Superintendent the schemer had sat with head cast

down and face flushed in mortification and anger. Now his head was

erect. Good! That praise was just a bluff! That red-head would get a

good hard knock now! Good enough for her! Now she'd wish she had not

turned down the son of the leading director of Crow Hill school!

Perhaps now she'd be glad to accept the attentions of Lyman. Marriage

would be a welcome solution to her troubles when she lost her position

in the school so near home. The Superintendent was not unmindful of

that "flea in his ear," after all.




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