The Wolf Point herald., 1923-09-13
CHAPTER ~
The First Day of School

The First Day of School.
Jim Irwin was full of his Emerson'i
Representative Men,J and his Car
lyle's French Revolution" and tn,
other old-fashioned, excellent, goot
literature which did not cost over q
cents volume; and he had pored long
and with many thrills over the pages
of Matthews Getting On in the
World" His view of efficiency was
that it is the capacity to see oppor-
tunity where others overlook 1t, and
make the most of it.
All through his life he had had his
own plans for becoming great. And
all the time he was bare-foOted, i'll
clad and dreamed his dreams to the
accompaniment of the growl of the
plOw cutting the roots under the
brown furrow-slice, or the wooshing of
the milk in the pail. At twenty eight,
he considered these dreams over.
AS for this new employment he saw
no great opportunity in it, He went
into the small. mean, ill-paid task as
part of the days work, with no
knowledge of the stirring of the nation
for a different sort of rural school,
and no suspicion that there lay in 1t
any highway to success in life. He
rather wondered why he had allowed
Jennie's sneer to sting him into the
course of action which put him in this
new relation to his neighbors.
But, true to his belief in honest,
thorough work, like a general prepar-
ing for battle, he examined his field of
operations. His manner of doing this
seemed to prove to Colonel Woodruff,
who watched 1t with keen interest as
something new in the world, that Jim
Irwin was possibly a Brown Mouse
But the colonel knew only a part of
Jim's performances. He saw Jim
clothed in slickers, walking through
transforms to the houses in the Wood
RUIZ district, as greedy for every mo-
ment of rain as haymaker for shine
and he knew that Jim made a great
many evening calls
But he did not know that Jim was
making what our sociologists call a
survey. For that matter, neither did
Jim; for books on sociology cost more
than 25 cents a volume, and Jim had
never seen one. However, II was q
survey. To be sure, he had long
known everybody in the district, save
the Simmses-and he was now friend |
Of all that exotic race; but there is
knowing and knowing.
He now had notebooks full Of facts /
about people and their farms. He |
knew how many acres each family pos
sessed, and what sort of farming each |
husband was doing-live stock. grain
or mixed. He knew about the mort
cages, and the debts. He knew
whether the family atmosphere was
happy and contented, or the reverse.
He knew which boys and girls were
wayward and insubordinate. He made
a record of the advancement in their
studies of all the children, and what
they liked to read. He knew their
favorite amusements. He talked with
their mothers and sisters-not about
the school, to any extent, but on the
weather, the horses, the automobiles,
InN SA1O-hlA1AE lndCliAeCly anu LuC
profits of farming
Really, though Jennie Woodruff did
not see how such doings related to
school work, Jim Irwin's school was
running full blast in the homes of the
district and the minds Of many pupils,
weeks and weeks before that day
when he called them to order on the
Monday specified in his contract as
the first day of school.
Con Bonner, who came to see the
opening, voiced the sentiments Of the
older people when he condemned the
school as disorderly. To be sure,
there were more pupils enrolled than
had ever entered on first day in the
whole history of the school, and it was
hard to accommodate them all But
the directors criticism was leveled
against the free-and-easy air Of the
children. Most OF them had brought
seed corn and a goodvsized corn show
was on view There was much argu-
ment as TO the merits of the various
entries Instead of a language lesson
from the textbook, Jim had given
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