This was done with apparently such delight to the children and with some evidently imported expression into his smooth mask-like face, that Mrs.Martin had to content herself with watching him with equal curiosity.

She was turning away with a sudden sense of forgotten dignity, when a shout of joyous, childish laughter attracted her attention to the window.

The new assistant, with half a dozen small children on his square shoulders, walking with bent back and every simulation of advanced senility, was evidently personating, with the assistance of astonishingly distorted features, the ogre of a Christmas pantomime.

As his eye caught hers the expression vanished, the mask-like face returned; he set the children down, and moved away.

And when school began, although he marshaled them triumphantly to the very door,--with what contortion of face or simulation of character she was unable to guess,--after he had entered the schoolroom and taken his seat every vestige of his previous facial aberration was gone, and only his usual stolidity remained.