198 NATURE STUDY REVIEW 10:5— May, 1914 



Miss Lacy had supervised the work of counting the seeds. 

 The day that the children were carrying the six weeds from the 

 vacant lot, to the basement. Principal Dahl met them. He had 

 seen Miss Lacy getting a hold on her students from day to day, 

 and marveled. He greeted the children pleasantly, examined 

 the weeds, and asked the:tn if they would not let him know how 

 many seeds they found. Aside to Miss Lacy, he said, "What 

 magic have you used to tame these children so that you can take 

 them out-of-doors to study?" 



It was during this time that M"ss Lacy began to respect and 

 even to love Mary Hogan. Never having done such a piece of 

 work herself, Josephine Lacy had given her school a task so 

 difficult that it would have resulted in dismal failure, had it not 

 been for the example set by Mary Hogan. It took two weeks of 

 steady hard work to separate the seeds of the wormseed from the 

 chaff and bits of pulverized leaves, but the girl was never heard 

 to grumble. She had even started to count the tiny black- 

 shiny seeds one by one, without a protest at so impossible a task, 

 when Miss Lacy gave her an easier way. She told her to measure 

 the seeds in a tiny bottle, and then multiply the seeds in the bottle 

 by the number of boctlefuls that the plant bore. 



The girl measured the number of bottlefuls of seeds and counted 

 the number of seeds in a bottle, but alas for Mary Hogan, she 

 could not multiply such large numbers together. To be sure, 

 she might have asked her helpers to solve the problem, but they 

 looked up to her in nature work and she could not bring herself 

 to confess her ignorance to them. Strange as it may seem, for 

 the first time in Mary Hogan's life she saw the usefulness of 

 things taught in school. 



Wondering why Mary did not bring in the results of her work, 

 Miss Lacy sought her out, and to her utter astonishment, found 

 her in tears. Ashamed to let her teacher see her crying, Mary 

 Hogan hid her face and would not look up. The sight of the girl 

 in tears, strangely affected Miss Lacy. She put her arms around 

 the child and drew her close up to her. As she did so, she saw 

 the unsolved problem on the desk before her. Guessing the 

 source of the trouble, Miss Lacy did the multiplying and quietly 

 left the girl to her own thoughts. From that time on Mary Hogan 

 began to be a student of books as well as a student of nature 

 and Josephine Lacy began to have time to teach. 



