Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 08 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/179

Rh Like every living body the school not only changes every year, day, and hour, but also has been subjected to temporary crises, misfortunes, ailments, and ill chances.

The Yasno-Polyanskaya school passed through one such painful crisis this very summer. There were many reasons for this: in the first place, as is always the case in the summer, all the best scholars were away; only occasionally we would meet them in the fields at their work or tending the cattle. In the second place, there were some new teachers present, and new influences began to be brought upon it. In the third place, each day teachers from other places, taking advantage of their summer vacation, came to visit the school. And nothing is more demoralizing to the regular conduct of a school than to have visitors, even though the visitor be a teacher himself.

We have four instructors. Two are veterans, having already taught two years in the school; they are accustomed to the pupils, to their work, and to the freedom and apparent lawlessness of the school.

Two of the teachers are new; both of them are recent graduates and lovers of outward propriety, of rules and bells and regulations and programs and the like, and are not wonted to the life of the school, as the first two are. What to the first seems reasonable, necessary, impossible to be otherwise, like the features on the face of a beloved though homely child, who has grown up under your very eyes, sometimes seems to the new teachers sheer disorder.

The school is established in a two-storied stone house. Two rooms are devoted to the school; the library has one, the teachers have two. On the porch, under the eaves, hangs the little bell with a cord tied to its tongue; in the entry down-stairs are bars and other gymnastic apparatus; in the upper entry is a workbench.

The stairs and entries are generally tracked over with snow or mud; there also hangs the roster.

The order of exercises is as follows:—

At eight o'clock, the resident teacher, who is a lover of