In his youth Wing Biddlebaum had been a schoolteacher in a town in Pennsylvania. He went by the less euphonic name of Adolph Myers. As Adolph Myers he was much loved by the boys of his school. Adolph Myers was meant by nature to be a teacher of youth. He was one of those rare, little-understood men who rule by a power so gentle that it passes as a lovable weakness. In their feeling for the boys under their charge such men are not unlike the finer sort of women in their love of men. And yet that is but crudely stated. It needs the poet there. With the boys of his school, Adolph Myers had walked in the evening or had sat talking until dusk upon the schoolhouse steps in a kind of dream. Here and there went his hands, caressing the shoulders of the boys, playing with their tousled heads. As he talked his voice became soft and musical. There was a caress in that also. In a way the voice and the hands, the stroking of the shoulders and the touching of the hair was a part of the schoolmaster's effort to carry a dream into the young minds. By the caress that was in the fingers he expressed himself. He was one of those men in whom the force that life creates is diffused, not centralised. Under the caress of his hands doubt and disbelief went out of the minds of the boys and they too began to dream.
Sherwood Anderson.