THIS IS A STORY about a middle-aged woman named Miss Wigglesworth and the Jersey bull she won in a raffle. The story takes place about ninety years ago, when roads were not paved, and country children could not get to the schools in town. Miss Wigglesworth lived with one of these country families and worked as a teacher for their children.

Miss Wigglesworth was a homely woman. Her skin and her eyes and her hair were all the same color, a dim, pasty tan, with a vague nose in the middle of it all, and such big front teeth that her upper lip had to work to keep them covered. She dressed in pale, flimsy clothes and she was always plucking at fringed shawls and scarves and gathered sleeves, trying to get them to drape in graceful folds. But the folds always seemed to come untucked or unpinned, and frazzled tails of fabric would trail after her, snagging on things.

Miss Wigglesworth took her job of civilizing these country children seriously. She would not allow the boys to sing about the Waxful Maid, whose sweetheart took her by her golden hair and drug her on the ground, then threw her into the river that flows through Waxful town. Instead she sat them down in straight-backed chairs and made them memorize long poems about well-dressed little boys who would hear the songs of angels in the night and sweetly die before dawn.

She thought she could tame the girls by having them play with dolls. But they were rough little girls who had never owned a doll, so the resourceful Miss Wigglesworth would go out at dusk and catch a few fat toad-frogs and sit up all night sewing little outfits for them with silk thread. In the schoolroom the next morning she and the girls would dress the toad-frogs up, tugging their little, nubbly, crooked arms through the ruffled sleeves and tying tiny silken bows under their gray, dank throats. By the time the toad-frogs were fully dressed in all their finery, they would be half-dead from the handling and would sit quite docilely in their little twig chairs. Miss Wigglesworth would arrange this grisly tableau in the middle of the schoolroom table—the mother, the father, and the boy and the girl toad-frogs, their grave dark eyes looking solemnly out from under their bonnets and hats, their struggles calmed by now to pitiful gestures of graceful desperation.

“There now,” Miss Wigglesworth would say, snipping a final thread and clapping her hands with delight. “Such a happy little family!”