As the master of the Indian Spring school emerged from the pine woods into the little clearing before the schoolhouse, he stopped whistling, put his hat less jauntily on his head, threw away some wild flowers he had gathered on his way, and otherwise assumed the severe demeanor of his profession and his mature age - which was at least twenty. Not that he usually felt this an assumption; it was a firm conviction of his serious nature that he impressed others, as he did himself, with the blended austerity and ennui of deep and exhausted experience. An amalgamation of emotions of uncontaminated young minds and twisted old thinkers. A grave contrast is represented in these pages; it provokes profound thought as reader realizes the great distance they have travelled from early innocence to later cynicism.