I am often reminded of a lady, who, during the war, volunteered to oversee all the Canteen work for soldiers passing through our town. Her favorite phrase, accompanied by a surprised accent, became the following one: “There's more to this job than you'd think from the outside looking in.” Then she would proceed with many astounding details: soldiers who required two cups of coffee, or three lumps of sugar, milk that in the course of time became dubious, and trains that in the course of time became late.I sympathized with this lady and helped her wash the dishes. And I have never questioned her statement. Moreover, I have yet to find the job to which this statement does not apply. I suppose that, until you become a postal clerk, you know very little about the intricacies into which a capital “S” may go, or how the rats eat the stamps. A job is always annotated for the employee.

Certainly, teaching school introduces you to manifold works which could not be anticipated by looking in. In fact, when my friendly janitor once said that it must be very easy to teach the First Grade, I caught myself falling back on the popular phrase with some emotion—“There's more to it than you'd think.” My most baffling problems were just a little too complex to mention to my janitor.

“What instantly comes to your mind,” says my college friend who is “taking” Psychology, “when I say the word ‘ping-pong’?”

I tell him. By right of which I retaliate, “What instantly comes to your mind when I say the word ‘sand-table’?”

“Oh, little paper pine trees,” responds the student (who is also “taking” Education),—“and wigwams and canoes, and a real piece of glass for a pond.”

All this comes to my mind, too,—with addenda. The addenda, however, come to my mind first: Spilling Sand, Sweeping up Sand, Trailing your fingers in Sand as you march past, and, if you are very newly five years old, Throwing Sand. This is not because I am soured on the sand-table. I have merely learned that there is more to one than you would suspect from the outside of one, looking in. Sand-tables may mean pine trees, and they may mean pandemonium.

Throw several such freighted words into a mixed group, and the reactions are passionately interesting. If you say, “Muscular movement,” “Interest and Attention,” “Socialized Classes,” or “Projects,” you can sift out the school-teachers by their smile.

In fact, there is a very large group of noun substantives which mark, for an Elementary teacher, at least, the seasons of the year. Usually she has a top drawer full of these. Many a teacher longs for the horse-chestnut-on-a-string season to appear, if only to finish up the season of the maple-key;—that large pale-green maple-key, which, by clever splitting of the central seed, may be made to stay on one's nose. My young friend Junior O'Brien once read to me “The Three Billy Goats Gruff,” with a maple-key over each ear, one on his freckled nose, and two on his apple cheeks. I gave over my reading-lesson period to researches as to how his hard little cheeks could yield enough slack to accommodate a key; and before I was ready to ask Junior to remove his decorations, the force of gravity intervened.

The maple-key, I suppose, suggests eye-glasses. Certainly a bit of wire, twisted into spectacles, follows keys. These may be very ornate in the upper grades, more nearly approaching the lorgnette, or even the opera-glass. It is a fascinating thing to see what a wire hairpin correctly treated will do to a young face. It lightens my day's load, this vision of grave childish eyes through the twisted rims, and that magnificent effort of will, contrary to nature, to obtain perfect immobility of the nose.

In company with the gross of wire spectacles in my drawer are numerous “snapping-bugs.” These may be bought for one cent each, in the snapping-bug season, of the ice-cream man. They are double bugs of tin, which, if pinched in the proper spot, will yield a sharp click reminiscent of the old-fashioned stereopticon lecture. Snapping-bugs may go far in “socializing” a First Grade, and in making friends with a newcomer at recess, but when they snap in school they give me an uneasy sense that my audience is in haste to have the picture changed. So I have six snapping-bugs.

I have five tumble-bugs. These are vivid green or purple gelatin capsules about an inch long, each housing a lead ball. Place the bug on an inclined plane, and it will promptly turn right side up, or the other side up, as long as the plane continues to incline. Since tumble-bugs are practically noiseless, their life is somewhat longer than that of their snapping cousins.

I have one sling-shot. It might be argued that First Graders are too young for sling-shots. So they are. They all too often receive their own charge full in the eye. They much prefer their comfortable acorn pipes. These are pandemic in October, as are also balloons.

I once perceived Dominick, in the height of the balloon season, with a frankfurter balloon, a shape then new. The active part was at just that moment inert—a dried and crumpled wisp of rubber. But its tube was unmistakably going to be blown. Dominick will never know how much his teacher wished to see his balloon, properly inflated, swaying and glowing as only a green sausage balloon can glow. I was deterred by a misgiving as to whether this type of balloon collapsed quietly after its magnificent spectacle, or whether it was of that variety which emits a peculiar penetrating whistle as it shrinks—an unmistakable sound, due to be placed accurately in her list of sounds by my teacher-friend next door, who does not approve of balloons in academic session. Dominick, however, wished more than I did to see his lighter-than-air craft in all its glory. I finally deposited it among the false noses and horse-chestnuts in my drawer.

I used to wonder why a teacher wanted marbles and walnuts, and pencil-sharpeners shaped like a rabbit. She doesn't. She simply does not want to hear them dropping, dropping, ever dropping, like the pennies in Sabbath School. There is something thrilling to anybody about a real agate. If it is about, you have to look at it. It is so perfectly round. Anything perfectly round, or perfectly cylindrical, likes, as we learn in Kindergarten, to roll. It likes, upon occasion, to “rest”; but it does not like this nearly as well. It is not fair to a child to let him spend his time playing with an agate in school. Neither is it fair to him to destroy the beauty of an agate for him—the charm of its shape, or the marvel of its construction. A teacher should strike a medium so delicately and absolutely medium that the angels themselves pause lest they jar the weights.

But the most curious phenomenon which I have observed, one which could not possibly be anticipated by an outsider looking in, is the effect of my setting the clock. There are times when a perfectly innocent shuffling of thirty-four feet in the First Grade assumes proportions far more important than Murder in the First Degree. Then it is that I set the clock. If it does not need setting, I set it forward first, and then back again. The clock is high on the wall, reached by the janitor (all too seldom) from a very high step-ladder. I set it from the floor. I take the yardstick and advance on the clock. It is a nice operation to push up the glass crystal with a pliant stick, haul down the minute-hand, and finally to close the door. The door must first be lifted into its proper position, and then hammered shut. Each bang of the yardstick sounds as if it would be followed certainly by showers of broken glass. I think that this uncertainty is what keeps my pupils' hearts fluttering and their feet still. Deathly silence always accompanies my setting of the clock. An imperceptible sound of relief, like a group-sigh, follows the click of the door in its catch. I can tiptoe back, on that sigh, to quiet industry.

It is true that children, with the best intentions, sometimes bring inappropriate busy-work to school. But teaching them has not dowered me with any disdain for my students. They are beneath me only in years. In fact, I raise my hat to some of them in spirit, as I teach them to raise theirs to me in truth. Here and there I calmly recognize a superior. I am constantly taking care that no youthful James Watt can say to me in later years, “You put out my first tea-kettle which boiled in school.”

I suppose that Pauline will eventually be a gracious hostess, saying just the right thing to her guests and to her husband—charming every masculine acquaintance on sight. Even now, I find that she is engaged, provisionally, to James Henry Davis. Perhaps some day Adamoskow, with his long clever fingers and his dreamy eyes, and no head whatever for “number,” will be charging me five dollars a seat to hear him play. His impresario can count the change for him.

And I know that James Henry Davis, at seventeen, will have the power to break hearts to the right of him, and hearts to the left of him, with the same dimple, the same wonderful pompadour, and the same lifted eyebrow that he now uses for the same purpose in Grade I. I know that he will out-dance his dancing-master at his Junior Prom. I shall wonder, when I see him in his white gloves, how I ever dared to take his acorn pipe away. Therefore I take it away as innocuously as possible, and touch his soft pompadour, in passing, with a reverent hand.