ne afternoon, when school was over and Totto-chan was preparing to go home, Oe came running to her and whispered, "The headmaster's mad at somebody." .

"Where?" asked Totto-chan.

She had never heard of the headmaster getting angry and was amazed. Oe was obviously amazed, too, the way he had come running in such a hurry to tell her.

"They're in the kitchen," said Oe, his good-natured eyes opened wide and his nostrils a little dilated.

"Come on!"

Totto-chan took Oe's hand and they both raced toward the headmaster's house. It adjoined the Assembly Hall, and the kitchen was right by the back entrance to the school grounds. The time Totto-chan fell into the cesspool she was taken through the kitchen to the bathroom to be scrubbed clean. And it was in the headmaster's kitchen that "something from the ocean and something from the hills" were made to be doled out at lunchtime.

As the two children tiptoed toward the kitchen, they heard the angry voice of the headmaster through the closed door.

"What made you say so thoughtlessly to Takahashi that he had a tail?"

It was their homeroom teacher who was being reprimanded.

"I didn't mean it seriously," they heard her reply.

"I just happened to notice him at that moment, and he looked so cute."

"But can't you see the seriousness of what you said? What can I do to make you understand the care I take with regard to Takahashi?"

Totto-chan remembered what happened in class that morning. The homeroom teacher had been telling them about human beings originally having tails. The children had thought it great fun. Grown-ups would have probably called her talk an introduction to the theory of evolution, it appealed to the children greatly. And when the teacher told them everybody had the vestige of a tail called the coccyx, each child started wondering where his was, and soon the classroom was in an uproar. Finally the teacher had said jokingly, "Maybe somebody here still has a tail! What about you, Takahashi!"

Takahashi had quickly stood up, shaking his head emphatically, and said in deadly earnest, "I haven't got one."

Totto-chan realized that was what the headmaster was talking about. His voice had now become more sad than angry.

"Did it occur to you to think how Takahashi might feel if he was asked if he had a tail?"

The children couldn't hear the teacher's reply. Totto-chan didn't understand why the headmaster was so angry about the tail. She would have loved being asked by the headmaster if she had a tail. Of course, she had nothing wrong with her, so she wouldn't have minded such a question. But Takahashi had stopped growing, and he knew it. That was why the headmaster had thought up events for Sports Day in which Takahashi would do well. He had them swim in the pool without swimsuits so children like Takahashi would lose their self consciousness. He did all he could to help children with physical handicaps, like Takahashi and Yasuaki-chan, lose any complexes they might have and the feeling they were inferior to other children. It was beyond the headmaster's comprehension how anyone could be so thoughtless as to ask Takahashi, just because he looked cute, whether he had a tail.

The headmaster happened to be visiting that class, standing in the back of the classroom, when she said it. Totto-chan could hear the homeroom teacher crying. "It was terribly wrong of me," she sobbed. "What can I do to apologize to Takahashi?"

The headmaster said nothing. Totto-chan couldn't see him through the glass door, but she wanted so much to be with him. She didn't know what it was all about, but somehow she felt more than ever that he was their friend. One must have felt that way, too.

Totto-chan never forgot how the headmaster had reprimanded their homeroom teacher in his kitchen and not in the faculty room, where the other teachers were. It showed he was an educator in the very best sense of the word, although Totto-chan did not realize that at the time. The sound of his voice and his words remained in her heart forever.

It was almost spring, Totto-chan's second spring at Tomoe, and the beginning of a new school year.