Mrs. Smith well remembers how her new dress was spoiled for her. It was the custom of the company's clerks to lay out a large bolt of print goods, for instance, and sell only from this until it was disposed of. The only available calico for the girl's new school dress was from a piece with a strikingly large figure; but great was her disgust to find on entering the schoolroom that her teacher, a young man, had a school coat made from the same bolt of calico, with the impressively large figure, though he came from Clatsop and she from Yamhill. This was joke enough to last the girls all the term. Mother Brown, however, circumvented the restriction of the company so far as to watch her chance and buy a whole bolt of cloth at a time, getting in that way, for one picnic occasion, enough muslin to dress the whole band of young girls in white. Who can reckon the world of happiness that these simple acts of kindliness brought to the little girls, some of them "mitherless bairns' and all of them feeling keenly the privations of a new and little improved territory? Or who can tell the good that such simple devices brought to the young community, made up of so many heterogeneous elements, and with the tendency always to sink toward the level of the surrounding barbarity? It was by such ways and acts that a refined society was established, possessing in many ways a charm that our later and more differentiated culture has lost.
The teachers of that early school were persons of high education, and much varied experience, although not having the specialized culture of the present day. These were Lewis Thompson, the pioneer Presbyterian missionary of the present boundaries of Oregon; Rev. Mr. Spalding, and Mr. Wm. Geiger. Miss Mary Johnson, of Oregon City, was also employed at one time. Mr. Geiger was the singing teacher. He was general master of ceremonies on all occasions; training the children
