Miss Mayfield was reminded of her first sight of a group of Africans; they all looked alike, she had thought then, and the same thought occurred to her now. I shall have difficulty in telling one from the other. With a single exception, they bore an almost family resemblance to one another; flaxen hair, blue eyes, clear, fresh complexions, and features slightly rugged, lacking the blurred, boneless look associated with the faces of the very young. Even the weeping infant had a nose, not a smudge of putty. The one exception, a boy of about twelve, stood out like a member of another race; his round head was covered with dark-brown hair, his round face looked almost sallow.

Probably, until very recently, there had been a good deal of inbreeding; and she remembered having read that the modern theory was that, given good healthy stock to start with, inbreeding was not so harmful as it had been held to be. These children all looked healthy enough, very healthy; at least . . . Miss Mayfield’s eye found and lingered on one other face which varied slightly. Towards the back, among the taller children, one rather pale face, pretty or was it that prettiness was simply a matter of being a little different from the general run?

I must notice every little difference, for there is nothing that children dislike more than to be called out of their names. There’s a head of hair that could have belonged to the child who was the model for ‘Bubbles’, and next to it two wonderful thick plaits; there’s a boy with noticeably prominent ears, and then, of course, the one with glasses. I shall distinguish them in time, and wonder that I ever found them confusing, just as I did in Entuba. And there are so few of them. Eight, at least, look as though they will come under Miss Benson’s care; that leaves me seventeen. I can give them absolutely individual attention. And I shall be in charge; if I’m in the middle of something interesting, there’ll be no bell ringing to make me stop and go running down a mile of corridor to another class. It’s going to be wonderful.

It was still wonderful when, on a Tuesday morning a fortnight all but a day later, the girl with the wonderful flaxen plaits, whose name Miss Mayfield now knew, halted by the tall desk and said:

‘Ethel Rigby’s gran towd me to tell you Ethel got a cowd.’

‘Ethel has a cold,’ Miss Mayfield said in the distinct voice which she used for such corrections.

‘Thass what I said,’ Audrey Head remarked, and went on.