With love in Christ,
Mallory Beth
Part One
Fort Worth, Texas
1887
A small frightened squeal from one of the pupils in the front row, caused Rosaline Carter to look up from her stack of papers, and glance to where the sound had come from. Her gaze met with seven-year-old Victoria Weller.
“ Victoria? Is everything alright?”, she asked the first grader. The girl looked up at her teacher, smiled, and replied shyly,
“ Yes Miss Carter.” she looked back down and continued her arithmetic assignment.
Rosaline smiled and again started grading the fourth through sixth grade history and arithmetic papers that had been due that morning.
“I love my job!”, she thought to herself as she finished writing a sentence of praise on Alice Cromwell, a fifth grader, who had just mastered the concept of multiplication. The thing she loved about her job was seeing the progress that her students made over the months of work. She never thought that she could admit how grateful she she was to her family and friends for all encouraging her to take this next step in her life. It had been a year since she had accepted the board's offer of teaching grades one through eight in the town's one room school house. She had started out as the teacher's assistant when she was 17. The previous teacher, Ruth Hopkins had married Reverend Cummings last Spring, and Rosaline was the one chosen to take her place. 'I hope Ruth and the Reverend are doing well. They just got back from their honeymoon; I hope to see her in church on Sunday..-'
Another yelp from one of Rosaline's students jerked her from her deep thoughts. She looked about the room, and caught a glance of one of the older boys throwing something small at the back of ten-year-old Jennie Anderson. Every pupil's eyes shot the front of the room, as Rosaline said to the boy in the back row,
“Samuel Warner, please do not make me have to ask you to not pester the younger students again,” the teacher said sternly but kindly, then looked down again when her scholar had angrily nodded. Samuel's family had just moved to Texas from New York to start a cattle ranch. Rosaline could tell that Samuel was the only one in his family that hated it there, and she felt sorry for him. But just because he was missing his home, it didn't make it okay for him to bully the younger students. She'd found herself kneeling by her bedside many times at night praying for wisdom from the Lord for ideas on how to handle Samuel. 'Oh, Lord! Ruth warned me about the older boys, but I told her I'd be fine; that I could handle them. But he's the only one of them who's given me trouble so far this year. God, what do I do?', she prayed silently.
Part two coming soon....
