Myra Kelly

“ The material prosperity which had recently fallen upon her had deprived her of all the old [200] comfortable joys which had brightened less prosperous days. Chief among these had been her father's light-hearted companionship. Mrs. Moriarty, the brightest feature of the new conditions, did her best to cheer and comfort the motherless child, but she could not hope to take the place of Jacob Morowsky, who had changed in so much more than name since he became John Nolan. Esther had dutifully tried—and failed—to understand why she, who had for so long been Esther Morowsky, was now Esther Nolan. ”

“ Reason, honor, self-control, knowledge, religion, the sense of right and wrong and of responsibility, hate, envy, love, joy—all the forces developed in the race through immemorial ages—are born and reach maturity in the individual during the little span of one short life.
Whether this theory be right or wrong, no one can question that it is interesting and suggestive. It is but one of dozens with which the teacher is supposed to be at least on speaking terms. ”

“ Let her hold, for instance, that the principle of self-activity is stronger than blind obedience ever was; that emulation as a spur to effort is the abomination of desolation; that a sound mind in a sound body is more to be valued than riches; that a keen eye for color and form, a steady hand to guide a pencil or a tool, a mind alert, eager, and reasonable, a heart which feels its brotherhood with all living, growing things, a free, frank speech, a generous nature, and an honest tongue, are in themselves a Declaration of Independence and a Psalm of Life. ”

“ Miss Bailey had been sent to an eminently good college, and had been instructed long and hard in psychology, so that she knew the psychologic moment when she met it. She now arose with congratulations and farewells. Mrs. Mowgelewsky arose also with Izzie still in her arms. She lavished endearments upon him and caresses upon his short black nose, and Izzie received them all with enthusiastic gratitude.
"And I think," said Miss Bailey in parting, "that you had better let that dog come with me. He seems a nice enough little thing, quiet, gentle, and very intelligent. ”

“ But through much harping on one theme they made their meaning clear.
"So you think," said the Principal, "that Miss Bailey is still teaching the smallest children because she is not as clever as the other teachers. You never were more mistaken in your lives. The hardest child to teach and manage, as all of you very well know, is the smallest child. The very best teaching should come at the very beginning." ”

“ In fact life was getting generally incomprehensible. For were not Hymie Solomon, the greenhorn, who had not yet learned English, Jakey Fishandler, who was so [178] bad that no teacher except Miss Bailey would have him in her class, and Becky Zalmanowsky, who—though the First Readers did not appreciate it—was a perfect type of the criminal idiot, were not these allowed to bask in Miss Bailey's presence, while self-respecting, hard-working First Readers were thrown into outer darkness? ”

“ You know how your mother feels about strangers, and you know how she feels about Christians, and what will she say to you—and what will she say to me—when she hears that a strange little Christian is living with you? ”

“ They learned him to write three [273] words that term, but when he found out that he couldn't read them in print, it sort of discouraged him, and he stayed home."
"It's awfully hard for you," Miss Bailey repeated, "but you mustn't let yourself say such things or think such things—about his getting killed, I mean—it's not"—she found herself on the verge of saying "Christian," but remembered that Gertie made no pretence to the Christian virtues—"not loving," she ended, and felt that the meaning of the two words was very much the same.
"Well, I don't love him," said Gertie shortly, "I hate him!" ”

“ An ideal is like a golden pheasant. As soon as the hunter comes up with one he kills it in more or less bloody fashion, tears its feathers off, absorbs what he can of it, and then sets out, refreshed, in pursuit of another. ”

“ A genius for opportunity drew Giusseppi Pagamini and his new piano organ to this sensational business opening, and the sweet strains of the piano organ drew Rosie Rashnowsky after him. They had drawn her for many blocks, and the meeting of the Cornelias was in full swing when her kimona and hair ribbons came into play upon the sidewalk. She laid the baby upon the steps, swept clean for her [245] reception by Isidore the conscientious, who had little idea—as he plied his broom and scrubbing-brush earlier in the day—that he was strewing the couch of his own small daughter's siesta. ”

“ And then Miss Bailey understood. She had heard of certain stranded waifs left high and dry when the ebb of Christianity receded before the flood of Juda [86] ism, and New York's great East Side, once a fashionable district, then claimed by a thrifty Irish element, became a Ghetto. It was the Jewish Sabbatical Law which gave the derelicts an opportunity to earn a few pennies every Saturday, for no orthodox Jew may kindle fire on the Sabbath. And no frugal Jew, even in the impossible circumstance of being able to afford it, will keep the stove alight all through Friday night. ”

“ If you can't arrange to exchange me with some other teacher, I shall apply for a transfer to an up-town school. If that Miss Bailey is so crazy about these children, why don't you let her keep them for another term? Every one seems to think she's a crackerjack teacher, so I guess she can get along in second term work, and I can take that new class of hers. ”

“ Abraham opened the purse. It contained fifteen cents. He appropriated the nickel as a first instalment of the reward so soon to be his, and then sped fleetly—as Miss Bailey's heroes had ever done—after the brown-shawled matron and glory. But the matron had evidently not been trained in the school of high [265] honor. She regarded Abraham with suspicion rather than with gratitude. She examined the purse in the same spirit, and her investigations led to loud outcries upon her part, and to swift flight upon Abraham's. ”

“ Almost every scientific, medical, and sociological discovery of the century has influenced the school. The single theory of the microbe as the cause of disease has well-nigh revolutionized it. It does not require a very long memory to reach back to the days of slates and slate rags, with their attendant horrors of sliminess and sucked pencils. ”

“ Mowgelewsky, "what for a dog iss that?" She counted her wealth, shook Izzie's paw, and then stooped forward, gathered him into her large embrace, and cried like a baby. "Mine Gott! Mine Gott!" she wailed again, and although she spent five minutes in apparent effort to evolve another and more suitable remark, her research [140] met with no greater success than the addition:
"He ain't a dog at all; he iss friends." ”

“ Almost any one is ready to describe it. Expeditions have gone forth in search of it, and have come back empty-handed or with the haziest of kodak films. And the most conservative of insurance companies would consider it a safe "risk."
In every-day and ordinary conditions this relation between home and school is really a question of mother and teacher, with the child as its stamping-ground. Two very busy women, indifferent, hostile, or strangers to each other, are engaged in the formulated and unformulated education of the child. ”

“ Philosophers, in their slow and doddering way, may question the exact part played by heredity in the formation of human character. Not so the mother. [10] She has reduced the problem to a formula. All that is bad, hateful, and spiteful in the child is the direct contribution of his father or his father's house. All that is appealing, lovable, interesting, and most especially all that is "cute," is directly inherited from the female side. ”

“ To some of the boys it seemed incredible that a person of mature years, and—upon other subjects—common sense, should cling to a theory which the most simple experiment must prove both mischievous and false. Had not Abraham Wishnewsky, a spineless person, misled by her heresies, but narrowly escaped the Children's Court and the Reformatory? [264]
Strolling through Gouverneur Street upon a Friday afternoon when the whole East Side is in a panic of shopping, he had seen a bewigged and beshawled matron shed a purse and pass on her way unheeding. ”

“ They were well accustomed to impromptu races, run on a course all thick beset with push-carts, ash cans, and humanity. Other tests of physical strength, with the exception by an occasional hand-to-hand conflict, neither determined, scientific, nor conclusive, were practically unknown. But to run on a prepared course surrounded by a stationary and admiring audience, of which Miss Bailey and the feminine First Readers formed an important part, was quite a different thing. Then, too, "prizes" was an alluring word. Teacher had shown it to mean articles of price and great attractiveness. ”

“ Ears and teeth, tonsils and adenoids, frequently furnish stumbling-blocks to education, but the teacher who reports them to the home authorities does so at the risk of wasting her time, or of being accused of causing or inventing the conditions. Recently the boards of education in the larger cities have been legislating for appropriations to be applied to free glasses, free dentistry, free professional services of all kinds to the children of the public schools. And the gratitude of the parents—whose duties are being attended to—takes fearful and wonderful forms. ”

“ I've watched you all playing in the yard, and I know what good runners some of you are. And then when they gave you prizes we, the girls and I, would have waved our flags and cheered just like the ladies Isaac told you about. Now wouldn't that be grand?" she cried, and the First Readers vociferously agreed with her, though Yetta Aaronsohn, the hypochondriacal, was still of the opinion that "wind on the legs ain't healthy for nobody." [40]
Cold indeed would be the heart of any masculine First Reader who could see, unmoved, the picture conjured up of Teacher's words. ”

“ The two Isidores and Ignatius Aloysius Diamentstein rushed madly round the yard. Patrick tried to urge the others to follow, but Morris had elected the long jump—and the long jump he would perform, all protests to the contrary notwithstanding. Nathan Spiderwitz grasped the clothes pole and [57] vaulted with great accuracy into the left wing of the grand stand. Isaac Belchatosky had secured a dilapidated ball from an abandoned bowling-alley, and he "put the shot" in all directions to his own satisfaction and the audience's terror until run into and overturned by Ignatius Aloysius Diamentstein. ”

“ The difficulty lies in catching what is then most literally "the psychologic moment," at which a raw root [20] dug up with a stone hammer will strike the young learner as a square meal.
Any interested outsider will testify that the new baby confirms this theory. It is an absolute savage. No head-hunter of Borneo could be more destitute of the "self-knowledge, self-reverence, self-control" which characterize the civilized man. ”

“ Whole volumes, learned, authoritative, but so far ponderous, have been devoted to determining the age at which the different impulses which prompt or qualify human action are added unto the individual. ”

“ How many mothers have heard of the theory, formulated and vouched for by most distinguished scientists, that the individual during the normal progress of his existence passes through the whole history of the development of his race? ”

“ I lays on mine bed, und I thinks how mine mamma has got a sickness, und how mine papa is by Harlem, und how I ain't got nobody beside of me. Und, Teacher, it makes me cold in mine heart. So I couldn't to lay no more, so I puts me on mit mine clothes some more, und I goes by the street the while peoples is there, und I needs I shall see peoples. So I sets by the curb, und mine heart it go und it go so I couldn't to feel how it go in mine inside. Und I thinks on my mamma, how I seen her mit bangages on the face, und mine heart it goes some more. Und, Teacher, Missis Bailey, I cries over it. ”

“ She knows as good as you do that nobody would let you work. An' she knows as good as you do, too, that craps ain't safe round here no more; an' that you just can't git nothin' unless you take it. She's actin' crazy just to fool you."
"No, she ain't," Isidore maintained, "she don't know nothings over them things."
"An' her grown up," sneered Hymie; "say, but you're easy!"
This faith in and affection for Miss Bailey were not confined to the little First Readers who inhabited Room 18 from nine until twelve, and again from one [270] until three. ”

“ O'Rourke will send Tim and Pat and Biddy and Jimmy and Mike and Delia, so that she may have leisure to take care of the twins and the baby, and to do the washing; while Mrs. Fitz-Jones will send Robert Albert Walter Fitz-John Fitz-Jones, so that she may be—to quote Browning, and since he's dead whatever he wrote must be considered proper—"safe in her corset lacing," ere she sallies out to bridge. Occasionally the two powers for good and evil in the child's world meet. A large mother will drag a reluctant boy to school, and loudly bewail herself for that she can do nothing with him. ”

“ My mamma, she puts me on mit all from wool underwear—costs twenty-seven cents a suit by Grand Street—and I puts them on when the school opens, and I don't takes them off to the fourth of July."
"Oh," retorted Becky, with more truth than she knew, "it ain't so awful healthy you should make like that. My mamma says it is healthy for me the wind shall come on my skin. She says sooner no [155] wind comes outside of your skin, no blood could go inside of your skin. And don't you know how teacher says what somebody what ain't got blood going in them is dead ones?" ”