See America First | Page 7

stream, two boys were fishing. It was hard to decide which made the more radiant picture: the softly sculptured landscape or the glow of joy that beamed from those shining boyish faces. How often had streams like this lured and detained many well meaning lads who had only a bent pin for a fishing hook and fish worms for bait, yet who had better luck than many an older person you may know, for they baited their hooks with their happy hearts.
Well do we recall how the siren songs of a little brook in early spring, or it may have been the golden willows filled with gurgling red wings, caused a court scene at school. The teacher was one of that type who study the stars by night but never his boys by day. He knew the golden willow not from the fragrance of its early blossoms or the gurgling melodies of the red-winged blackbird's song, but from the fact that they make excellent switches which cut keenly, bend but do not break. The only time he ever visited the brook was when he needed a new bundle of switches. With a jury like that, little wonder the case went clean against Willie.
Now Willie had missed school; that much was evident. So the teacher called him up to his desk behind which he sat in his revolving chair. Willie's face had been red, unusually so, and glowed all morning like sumac seed against its green setting. Willie came forward slowly. With downcast face he eyed a crack in the floor near the teacher's desk while his right hand rested tremblingly against his flushed forehead. "Willie, what makes you tremble so?" asked the teacher in a gruff voice. "I-I'm sick," came the feeble reply.
"Why did you miss school yesterday?" he repeated sternly.
"I-I fell into the creek on my way to school and got my feet wet." As if to bring proof of what he said, he wiggled the toe that the hole in his boot showed to best advantage. By this time death-like silence reigned in the usually very noisy schoolroom. Only the shrieking sound of a pencil toiling slowly up the steep incline of a slate like an ungreased wagon up the Alleghanies broke the silence. Strange it was that this sound, so noticeable at other times, no one heard. Like a piece of grand opera music this formed a sort of a musical prelude before the villain appeared. But mark you the villain was not in front of the desk but back of it, revolving like a pin wheel in an autumn gale. Suddenly there was a wild waving of hands.
"John, what is it," roared a loud voice. "I can't get the fifth example on page thirty-six." Now John had never worked so many as that before and the rest of the class looked amazed. Lily, remembering yesterday's lecture on cleanliness, washed her slate three times with her hand and mopped it up with the sleeve of her dress and yet it was far from clean.
Looking at Johnny now, it would not have taken a physician to tell that something was seriously wrong with him. He was sick, without doubt, and yesterday it was a double ailment he had. Any diagnosis would have revealed spring fever incipient and trout fever acute. Willie was perhaps thinking of the old saw mills where cascades fall and the phoebe-bird sings and the high banks, which the stream had worn deeply because it had some obstacle to get around. Poor scared Willie! He, too, had an obstacle to get around, so he said, "I slipped off of the foot log and got my feet wet and had to go home."
Now, as every teacher knows, wet feet never daunted any boy from achieving a purpose. The revolving chair swung around once more, the teacher arose from his comfortable perch and stooped very low in order to strike the trembling little boy who had heard the phoebe-bird prophesying spring, and had found the first hepaticas among the withered leaves and listened to the rippling song of the brook.
Could the one in the revolving chair have known what he did toward crushing the love of the true and the beautiful out of the life before him, the chair would not have been at once reoccupied. What had he to give the eager growing soul hungering and thirsting for the beauty and freedom of Nature? Had he more of the beauty and fragrance of the willow, so redolent of spring, in his heart there were less need of willows above his desk. A few of the fragrant buds in a vase would have had more effect upon Willie and the whole school than the scattered bits of golden pieces lying on the floor. Which is the greater