THE IMP AND THE DRUM
IT never would have happened but for Miss Eleanor's mission class. Once a week through the winter she went in the cars to a town not far from the city, where there were a great many mills, but few schools, and talked to a crowd of the mill-hands' little children. She did not give them lessons, exactly, but she told them stories and sang songs with them and interested them in keeping themselves and their homes clean and pretty. They were very fond of her and were continually bringing in other children, so that after the first year she gave up the small room she had rented and took them up two flights into an old dancing-hall, a little out of the centre of the town.
The Imp had been from the beginning deeply interested in this scheme, and when he learned that many of the boys were just exactly eight and a half—his own age—and that they played all sorts of games and told stories and sang songs,
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