OUT OF THE MOUTHS OF BABES AND SUCKLINGS
I Miss Belle
The sun shone mildly, though it was still late January, while the wind,
which occasionally rustled the dry leaves about the fence corners, had
scarcely a suggestion of winter in its soft touch. Across the white
pike, and away on either side over the rolling blue grass meadows, the
Kentucky landscape unfolded itself, lined with brown and white fences,
and dotted with venerable trees. A buggy, drawn by a carefully-stepping
bay horse, came over the knoll ahead, framing itself naturally into the
beautiful landscape. Surely, that must be Joe and Miss Belle; it was so
like her, since she always seemed at home everywhere, making herself a
natural part of her surroundings. Another moment and there was no longer
any doubt. It was Miss Belle with three youngsters crowded into her lap
and beside her in the narrow buggy seat, while a dangling leg in the
rear suggested an occupant of the axle.
"Well, well," cried Miss Belle, cordially, as Joe stopped, glad of any
excuse not to go, "where are you bound for? You didn't come all the way
over to ride back with me?"
"No, indeed, Miss Belle," I laughed back, "no one ever expects to ride
with you so near the school-house. I'll walk along ahead until you begin
to unload."
"Go along, now you're casting reflections on Joe's speed. Come, Joe,
we'll show him." Joe, who did not leave his accustomed walk at once,
finally yielded to the suggestion of a gentle blow from the whip and
broke into a trot.
"Lem'me walk with you," cried the rider on the springs, slipping from
her perch and stepping out beside the buggy. So we journeyed for half a
mile. The horse, under constant urging, jogged along, while the spring
rider and I trotted side by side over the well-made pike. Then Miss
Belle drew rein in front of a small, yellow house.
"Now, out you go," she exclaimed to her young companions. "All out here
but one. Goodbye, dearies. All right, up you get," and in a moment we
were snugly fixed in the buggy for a half hour's ride behind Joe.
"You see those two little girls who got off there," said Miss Belle,
pointing to the house we had just left, "well, they are two of a family
of six--two younger than those. Their mother died last winter, so
naturally I take an interest in them. Their father does his best with
them, but it is a big task for a man to handle alone."
The last child was unloaded by this time, and Miss Belle, settling
herself back comfortably, chatted about her work in a one-room country
school in the Blue Grass belt of Kentucky.
II Going to Work Through the Children
"Maybe there are thirty-five families that my school ought to draw
from," she began. "Six years ago when I took this school some of them
surely did need help. Dearie me! The things they didn't know about
comfort and decency would fix up a whole neighborhood for life. They
wore stockings till they dropped off. Some of the girls put on sweaters
in October, wore them till Christmas, washed them, and then wore them
till spring. You never saw such utterly wretched homes. There was hardly
a window shade in the neighborhood, nor a curtain either. It wasn't that
the women didn't care--they simply didn't know.
"I saw it all," said Miss Belle, nodding her head thoughtfully, "and it
worried me a great deal at first. I just had to get hold of those people
and help them--I had made up my mind to that. Impatience wouldn't do,
though, so I said to myself, 'Now, my dear, don't you be in any hurry.
You can't do anything with the old folks, they're too proud. If you
succeed at all it's got to be through the children.' So I just waited,
keeping my eyes open, and teaching school all of the while, until, the
first thing I knew, the way opened up--you never would guess how--it was
through biscuits.["]
III Beginning on Muffins
"The folks around here never had seen anything except white bread. There
wasn't a piece of cornbread or of graham anywhere. You know what their
white bread is, too--heavy, sour, badly made and only half cooked. The
old folks were satisfied, though, and there didn't seem to be any way to
go at it except through the youngsters. Day after day I saw them take
raw white biscuits and sandwiches made of salt-rising white bread out of
their baskets, wondering how they could eat them. Still I didn't say
anything, but every lunch time I ate corn muffins or graham wafers, with
all of the gusto I could master. One day a little girl up and asked me:
"'Say, Miss Belle, what may you all be eatin'?'
"'Corn muffins,' said I. 'Ever taste them?'
"'Nope.'
"'Well, wouldn't you like a taste?'
"'Sure I would.'
"She took it, and a great big one, too. 'Um,' says she, smacking her
lips, 'Um.'
"'Like it?' I asked.
"'Um,' says she again, like a baby with a full stomach.
"'Oh, Miss Belle,' piped up Annie, 'how do you make 'em?'
"That was the chance I had been waiting for.
"'Would you like to know?' I asked, and to a chorus of 'Sure,' ''Deed we
would,' 'Oh, yes,' I put the recipe on the board, and it wasn't two days
before those girls brought in as good corn muffins as I ever tasted.
Little Annie is a good cook--never saw a better--and before the week was
out she says to me:
"'Miss Belle, ma's mad with you.'
"'What all's the matter?' I asked.
"'She says since you taught us to make those corn muffins she'll be
eaten out of house and home. The first night I made 'em pa ate eleven.
He hasn't slackened off a bit since. He must have 'em every day.'
"That made the going pretty easy," Miss Belle went on. "The muffins were
mighty good, they were new, and, by comparison, the white biscuits
didn't have a show. It wasn't long before I had the whole neighborhood
making corn muffins, graham wafers, black bread, graham bread and
whole-wheat bread. They sure did catch on to the idea quickly. Every
Monday I put a recipe on the board. These women knew how to cook the
fancy things. It was the plain, simple, wholesome things that they
needed to know about, so my recipes were always for them. During the
week each of the children cooks the thing and brings it to me, and the
one who gets the best result puts a recipe on the board Friday.
"You see, after I once got started it wasn't hard to follow up any line
I liked. By the time I was putting a recipe a week on the board the
mothers got naturally interested and would come to school to ask about
this recipe and that. They wouldn't take any advice, you understand, not
they! They knew all about cooking, so they thought, but they were mighty
proud of the things their daughters did, particularly when they took the
prizes at the county fair. Besides that, it made a whole lot of
difference at home, because the things they made helped out a lot and
tasted mighty good on the table."
Miss Belle's next move was against the cake--soggy, sticky stuff, full
of butter, that was very generally eaten by all of the families that
could afford it. Expensive and fearfully indigestible it made up,
together with bread, almost the entire contents of most lunch baskets.
"I couldn't see quite how to go about the cake business," Miss Belle
commented, "because they were particularly proud of it. Finally, though,
I hit on an idea. One of the women in the neighborhood was sick. She was
a good cook and knew good cooking when she saw it, so I got my sister to
make an angel cake, which I took around to her. I do believe it was the
first light cake she had ever tasted--anyway, she was tickled to death.
It wasn't long after that before every one who could afford to do it was
making angel food. Of course it's expensive, but since they were bound
to make cake, that was a lot better than the other."
Similar tactics gradually replaced the fried meats by roasts and stews.
When Miss Belle came, meat swam in fat while it cooked and came from the
stove loaded with grease. Everybody fried meat, and when by chance they
bought a roast they began by boiling all of the juice out of it before
they put it in the oven. Miss Belle's stews and roasts made better
eating, though. The men-folks liked them hugely and the old frying
process was doomed.
"No," concluded Miss Belle, laughingly, "you can't do a thing with the
old folks. Why if I was to go into a kitchen belonging to one of those
women and tell her how to sift flour she would run me out quick, but
when Annie comes home and makes such muffins that the man of the family
eats eleven the first time, there is no way to answer back. The muffins
speak for themselves."
IV Taking the Boys in Hand
While the girls were making over the diet of the neighborhood Miss Belle
was working through the boys to improve the strains of corn used by the
farmers, the methods of fertilizing and the quality of the truck
patches. A few years ago when the farmer scorned newfangled ideas it was
the boys that took home methods for numbering and testing each ear of
corn to determine whether or not the kernels on it would sprout when
they were planted. The farmer who turns a deaf ear to argument can offer
no effective reply to a corn-tester in which only one kernel in three
has sprouted. The ears are infertile, from one cause or another, and the
sooner he replaces them by fertile seed the better for his corn crop.
Out beside a white limestone pike stands the school in which Miss Belle
has done her work. One would hardly stop to look at it, because it
differs in no way from thousands of similar country school-houses.
Modest and unassuming, like Miss Belle, it holds only one feature of
real interest--the faces of the children. Bright, eager, enthusiastic,
they labor earnestly over their lessons in order that they may get at
their "busy work," and linger over their "busy work" during recess and
after school, because it glides so swiftly from their deft fingers. In
this, as in everything else which she does, Miss Belle has a system. The
child whose lessons are not done, and done up to a certain grade, is not
taught new stitches or new designs. Even the youngest responds to the
stimulus, and the little girl in a pink frock, with pink ribbons on her
brown pig-tails, lays aside the mat she is making to write "Annie Belle
Lewis" on the board, and to tell you that she is seven; while John
Murphy, of the mature age of eleven, stops crocheting ear-mufflers for a
moment to tell you what he is doing and why he does it.
V "Busy Work" as an Asset
"You never would guess what a help the 'busy work' is," smiled Miss
Belle. "You see, they never can do it until their lessons are finished,
so they are as good at arithmetic as they are at patching. Then I always
teach the little ones patterns and stitches where they have to count,
'One, two, three, four, five, and drop one,' you know, and in the
shortest time they learn their number work. It seems to go so much more
quickly when they do it in connection with some pieces that they can
see. But you never would guess the best thing the sewing has done--it
has stopped gossiping. It's hard to believe, I know, but it's true.
There used to be a lot of trouble in this neighborhood. People told
tales, there was ill feeling, and folks quarreled a great deal of the
time. It wasn't long before I found out that it was the girls who did
most of the tale-bearing. No wonder, either! They weren't very busy in
school, and they had nothing much to do at home except to listen and
talk. Really, they hadn't any decent interest in life. Of course there
was no use in saying anything, but I felt that if I could get them busy
at something they liked they would stop talking. It wasn't enough to
start them at dressmaking, either, but when I started in on hard, fancy
work designs I had them. They made pretty clothes, embroidered them;
made lace and doilies. Most of the girls can pick up a new Irish-lace
pattern from a fashion-book as easily as I can, and they are rabid for
new patterns. The same girls who did most of the tale-bearing are busy
at work, and I find them swapping patterns and recipes instead of
stories."
While the girls patch, darn, crochet, hem, knit, weave baskets, make
garments and do the various kinds of "busy work," the boys clean the
school yard, plant walnut trees--Mrs. Faulconer, the County
Superintendent, is having the school children plant nut trees along all
the pikes--and do anything else which is not beneath their dignity.
"They have no work benches," lamented Miss Belle, "I hope they will get
them soon, although there is really no place to put them." Indeed, in a
little building packed with fifty children and the school-room furniture
the space is narrow.
Yet this little one-room building at Locust Grove has left such a mark
on the community that when the County School Board recently decided to
transfer Miss Belle to a larger school the member from her district
promptly resigned, and refused to be placated until every other member
of the board had apologized to him and promised to leave Miss Belle in
his school.
"We never saw the old gentleman mad before," said a neighbor. "But he
certainly was mad then. He had watched Miss Belle's work grow, and knew
what it had meant to the children; so when they proposed to take her
away he went right up in the air."
VI Marguerite
What wonder? He had seen the magic workings of a hand that felt the
pulse, judged the symptoms, and prescribed a sure-to-cure remedy for a
countryside full of ignorance, drunkenness, bitter hatreds and
never-ending quarrels. Within a stone's throw of his house he had seen
the transformation in the life of a little girl named Marguerite. Since
her birth she had lived in darkness, but into her desolate home Miss
Belle had sent light.
"You never saw a worse home," says Miss Belle. "Her mother was woefully
ignorant of everything in the way of home-making. The children were
wretchedly dressed. The house was barrenness itself--no shades, no
curtains, no decorations of any kind. It was pathetic. When she came to
school neither she nor her mother could sew a stitch."
Marguerite, an apt girl with her fingers, eagerly learned the needlework
lessons of the school. She taught her mother to sew, while she herself
made portieres and curtains, lightening up the old home with a rare new
beauty.
Here again is Lillie, who is very slow at needlework and arithmetic, but
who has put the family diet on a wholesome basis by learning to cook
some of the most delicious, nourishing dishes. Her bread--the best in
Fayette County--is light as a feather. Hannah comes back after leaving
school to learn how to ply her needle. Until a year ago Christmas she
could not sew a stitch; now her stitches are so neat as to be almost
invisible. Mrs. Hawly, aroused to enthusiasm by her thirteen-year-old
daughter, has come to school, learned plain and fancy sewing, and
started to make her own and her daughter's clothes. Everywhere are the
marks of a teacher's handiwork stamped indelibly on the lives of her
scholars and their families. Small wonder that the old gentleman on the
board was loath to part with Miss Belle!
VII Winning Over the Families
With supreme joy Miss Belle tells of her conquest of the fathers of her
boys and girls--her family, as she calls it. "The children were very
poorly cared for," she says. "The fathers spent the money for whiskey,
and the mothers lacked the means and the knowledge to clothe the
children better. Sometimes they were pitiful in their poor shoes and
thin clothes. Well, sir, we got up a Christmas entertainment, and,
except for one or two, the children wore the same clothes they had been
coming to school in all winter--shabby, patched and dirty as some of
them were. They stood up there, though, one and all, to do their turns
and speak their pieces, and their fathers were ashamed. They saw their
children in old clothes, and the children of some of the neighbors all
fixed up, and they just couldn't stand it.
"It surely did make a difference the next year." Miss Belle's cheery
face broadened with a satisfied smile. "The men didn't say a word--you
know our men aren't in the habit of saying very much--but they went to
town themselves the day before the entertainment and came back with new
dresses for the girls and new clothes for the boys. Of course some of
them were so small they would scarcely go on, while others were miles
big; but every one had something new and no one felt badly.
"This Christmas," concluded Miss Belle, "our entertainment packed the
school-house, and some were turned away. Just to show you how crowded it
was--there were twenty-four babies there. I was ready for them, though,
with two pounds of stick candy; so whenever a baby squalled he got a
stick of candy quick."
Strange, good things have followed the visits of the mothers to the
schools. They would never have come had it not been for the wonderful
things which their children were learning with such untoward enthusiasm.
One girl, who had been particularly successful with her needlework,
brought her mother to school--a hard woman who had a standing quarrel
with seven of her neighbors at that particular time. It took a little
tact, but when the right moment arrived Miss Belle suggested that she
pay a visit to a sick neighbor and offer to help. The woman went at
last, found that it was a very pleasant thing on the whole to be
friendly, and carried the glad tidings into her life, substituting
kindness for her previous rule of incivility. To her surprise her
enemies have all disappeared.
The mothers, coming to school to talk over the work of their children,
have for the first time seen one another at their best. Sitting over a
friendly cup of tea, chatting about Jane's dress or Willie's lessons,
they have learned the art of social intercourse. Slowly the lesson has
come to them, until to-day there is not a woman in the neighborhood who
is not on speaking terms with every one else, a situation undreamed of
five years ago.
Nine months in each year Miss Belle McCubbing holds her classes in the
Locust Grove School, which stands on the Military Pike, seven miles
outside of Lexington, Kentucky. "Angels watch over that school," says
Mrs. Faulconer. Doubtless these angels are the good angels of the
community, for in six years the bitterness of neighborhood gossip and
controversy has been replaced by a spirit of neighborly helpfulness.
Boys and girls, doing Miss Belle's "busy work," fathers and mothers
learning from their children, have heaped upon Miss Belle's deserving
head the peerless praise of a community come to itself--regenerated in
thought and act, turned from the wretchedness and desolation of the past
to the light and civilization of the future, saved and blessed by the
lives of a teacher and her children.