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Tillie, a Mennonite Maid; a Story of the Pennsylvania Dutch

by Helen Reimensnyder Martin · English · Gutenberg #4760 · 425,677 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Tillie, a Mennonite Maid; a Story of the Pennsylvania Dutch

Author: Helen Reimensnyder Martin


        
Release date: December 1, 2003 [eBook #4760]
                Most recently updated: December 28, 2020

Language: English

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TILLIE: A MENNONITE MAID

A STORY OF THE PENNSYLVANIA DUTCH


BY

HELEN REIMENSNYDER MARTIN





CONTENTS


     I "OH, I LOVE HER! I LOVE HER!"
    II "I'M GOING TO LEARN YOU ONCE!"
   III "WHAT'S HURTIN' YOU, TILLIE?"
    IV "THE DOC" COMBINES BUSINESS AND PLEASURE
     V "NOVELS AIN'T MORAL, DOC!"
    VI JAKE GETZ IN A QUANDARY
   VII "THE LAST DAYS OF PUMP-EYE"
  VIII MISS MARGARET'S ERRAND
    IX "I'LL DO MY DARN BEST, TEACHER!"
     X ADAM SCHUNK'S FUNERAL
    XI "POP! I FEEL TO BE PLAIN"
   XII ABSALOM KEEPS COMPANY
  XIII EZRA HERR, PEDAGOGUE
   XIV THE HARVARD GRADUATE
    XV THE WACKERNAGELS AT HOME
   XVI THE WACKERNAGELS "CONWERSE"
  XVII THE TEACHER MEETS ABSALOM
 XVIII TILLIE REVEALS HERSELF
   XIX TILLIE TELLS A LIE
    XX TILLIE IS "SET BACK"
   XXI "I'LL MARRY HIM TO-MORROW!"
  XXII THE DOC CONCOCTS A PLOT
 XXIII SUNSHINE AND SHADOW
  XXIV THE REVOLT OF TILLIE
   XXV GETZ "LEARNS" TILLIE
  XXVI TILLIE'S LAST FIGHT





TILLIE: A MENNONITE MAID

A STORY OF THE PENNSYLVANIA DUTCH




I

"OH, I LOVE HER! I LOVE HER!"


Tillie's slender little body thrilled with a peculiar ecstasy as she
stepped upon the platform and felt her close proximity to the
teacher--so close that she could catch the sweet, wonderful fragrance
of her clothes and see the heave and fall of her bosom. Once Tillie's
head had rested against that motherly bosom. She had fainted in school
one morning after a day and evening of hard, hard work in her father's
celery-beds, followed by a chastisement for being caught with a
"story-book"; and she had come out of her faint to find herself in the
heaven of sitting on Miss Margaret's lap, her head against her breast
and Miss Margaret's soft hand smoothing her cheek and hair. And it was
in that blissful moment that Tillie had discovered, for the first time
in her young existence, that life could be worth while. Not within her
memory had any one ever caressed her before, or spoken to her tenderly,
and in that fascinating tone of anxious concern.

Afterward, Tillie often tried to faint again in school; but, such is
Nature's perversity, she never could succeed.

School had just been called after the noon recess, and Miss Margaret
was standing before her desk with a watchful eye on the troops of
children crowding in from the playground to their seats, when the
little girl stepped to her side on the platform.

This country school-house was a dingy little building in the heart of
Lancaster County, the home of the Pennsylvania Dutch. Miss Margaret had
been the teacher only a few months, and having come from Kentucky and
not being "a Millersville Normal," she differed quite radically from
any teacher they had ever had in New Canaan. Indeed, she was so wholly
different from any one Tillie had ever seen in her life, that to the
child's adoring heart she was nothing less than a miracle. Surely no
one but Cinderella had ever been so beautiful! And how different, too,
were her clothes from those of the other young ladies of New Canaan,
and, oh, so much prettier--though not nearly so fancy; and she didn't
"speak her words" as other people of Tillie's acquaintance spoke. To
Tillie it was celestial music to hear Miss Margaret say, for instance,
"buttah" when she meant butter-r-r, and "windo" for windah. "It gives
her such a nice sound when she talks," thought Tillie.

Sometimes Miss Margaret's ignorance of the dialect of the neighborhood
led to complications, as in her conversation just now with Tillie.

"Well?" she inquired, lifting the little girl's chin with her
forefinger as Tillie stood at her side and thereby causing that small
worshiper to blush with radiant pleasure. "What is it, honey?"

Miss Margaret always made Tillie feel that she LIKED her. Tillie
wondered how Miss Margaret could like HER! What was there to like? No
one had ever liked her before.

"It wonders me!" Tillie often whispered to herself with throbbing heart.

"Please, Miss Margaret," said the child, "pop says to ast you will you
give me the darst to go home till half-past three this after?"

"If you go home till half-past three, you need not come back, honey--it
wouldn't be worth while, when school closes at four."

"But I don't mean," said Tillie, in puzzled surprise, "that I want to
go home and come back. I sayed whether I have the darst to go home till
half-past three. Pop he's went to Lancaster, and he'll be back till
half-past three a'ready, and he says then I got to be home to help him
in the celery-beds."

Miss Margaret held her pretty head on one side, considering, as she
looked down into the little girl's upturned face. "Is this a conundrum,
Tillie? How your father be in Lancaster now and yet be home until
half-past three? It's uncanny. Unless," she added, a ray of light
coming to her,--"unless 'till' means BY. Your father will be home BY
half-past three and wants you then?"

"Yes, ma'am. I can't talk just so right," said Tillie apologetically,
"like what you can. Yes, sometimes I say my we's like my w's, yet!"

Miss Margaret laughed. "Bless your little heart!" she said, running her
fingers through Tillie's hair. "But you would rather stay in school
until four, wouldn't you, than go home to help your father in the
celery-beds?"

"Oh, yes, ma'am," said Tillie wistfully, "but pop he has to get them
beds through till Saturday market a'ready, and so we got to get 'em
done behind Thursday or Friday yet."

"If I say you can't go home?"

Tillie colored all over her sensitive little face as, instead of
answering, she nervously worked her toe into a crack in the platform.

"But your father can't blame YOU, honey, if I won't let you go home."

"He wouldn't stop to ast me was it my fault, Miss Margaret. If I wasn't
there on time, he'd just--"

"All right, dear, you may go at half-past three, then," Miss Margaret
gently said, patting the child's shoulder. "As soon as you have written
your composition."

"Yes, ma'am, Miss Margaret."

It was hard for Tillie, as she sat at her desk that afternoon, to fix
her wandering attention upon the writing of her composition, so
fascinating was it just to revel idly in the sense of the touch of that
loved hand that had stroked her hair, and the tone of that caressing
voice that had called her "honey."

Miss Margaret always said to the composition classes, "Just try to
write simply of what you see or feel, and then you will be sure to
write a good 'composition.'"

Tillie was moved this afternoon to pour out on paper all that she
"felt" about her divinity. But she had some misgivings as to the
fitness of this.

She dwelt upon the thought of it, however, dreamily gazing out of the
window near which she sat, into the blue sky of the October
afternoon--until presently her ear was caught by the sound of Miss
Margaret's voice speaking to Absalom Puntz, who stood at the foot of
the composition class, now before her on the platform.

"You may read your composition, Absalom."

Absalom was one of "the big boys," but though he was sixteen years old
and large for his age, his slowness in learning classed him with the
children of twelve or thirteen. However, as learning was considered in
New Canaan a superfluous and wholly unnecessary adjunct to the means of
living, Absalom's want of agility in imbibing erudition never troubled
him, nor did it in the least call forth the pity or contempt of his
schoolmates.

Three times during the morning session he had raised his hand to
announce stolidly to his long-suffering teacher, "I can't think of no
subjeck"; and at last Miss Margaret had relaxed her Spartan resolution
to make him do his own thinking and had helped him out.

"Write of something that is interesting you just at present. Isn't
there some one thing you care more about than other things?" she had
asked.

Absalom had stared at her blankly without replying.

"Now, Absalom," she had said desperately, "I think I know one thing you
have been interested in lately--write me a composition on Girls."

Of course the school had greeted the advice with a laugh, and Miss
Margaret had smiled with them, though she had not meant to be facetious.

Absalom, however, had taken her suggestion seriously.

"Is your composition written, Absalom?" she was asking as Tillie turned
from the window, her contemplation of her own composition arrested by
the sound of the voice which to her was the sweetest music in the world.

"No'm," sullenly answered Absalom. "I didn't get it through till it was
time a'ready."

"But, Absalom, you've been at it this whole blessed day! You've not
done another thing!"

"I wrote off some of it."

"Well," sighed Miss Margaret, "let us hear what you have done."

Absalom unfolded a sheet of paper and laboriously read:

"GIRLS

"The only thing I took particular notice to, about Girls, is that they
are always picking lint off each other, still."

He stopped and slowly folded his paper.

"But go on," said Miss Margaret. "Read it all.'

"That's all the fu'ther I got."

Miss Margaret looked at him for an instant, then suddenly lifted the
lid of her desk, evidently to search for something. When she closed it
her face was quite grave.

"We'll have the reading-lesson now," she announced.

Tillie tried to withdraw her attention from the teacher and fix it on
her own work, but the gay, glad tone in which Lizzie Harnish was
reading the lines,

     "When thoughts
  Of the last bitter hour come like a blight
  Over thy spirit--"

hopelessly checked the flow of her ideas.

This class was large, and by the time Absalom's turn to read was
reached, "Thanatopsis" had been finished, and so the first stanza of
"The Bells" fell to him. It had transpired in the reading of
"Thanatopsis" that a grave and solemn tone best suited that poem, and
the value of this intelligence was made manifest when, in a voice of
preternatural solemnity, he read:

"What a world of merriment their melody foretells!"

Instantly, when he had finished his "stanza," Lizzie raised her hand to
offer a criticism. "Absalom, he didn't put in no gestures."

Miss Margaret's predecessor had painstakingly trained his
reading-classes in the Art of Gesticulation in Public Speaking, and
Miss Margaret found the results of his labors so entertaining that she
had never been able to bring herself to suppress the monstrosity.

"I don't like them gestures," sulkily retorted Absalom.

"Never mind the gestures," Miss Margaret consoled him--which
indifference on her part seemed high treason to the well-trained class.

"I'll hear you read, now, the list of synonyms you found in these two
poems," she added. "Lizzie may read first."

While the class rapidly leafed their readers to find their lists of
synonyms, Miss Margaret looked up and spoke to Tillie, reminding her
gently that that composition would not be written by half-past three if
she did not hasten her work.

Tillie blushed with embarrassment at being caught in an idleness that
had to be reproved, and resolutely bent all her powers to her task.

She looked about the room for a subject. The walls were adorned with
the print portraits of "great men,"--former State superintendents of
public instruction in Pennsylvania,--and with highly colored chromo
portraits of Washington, Lincoln, Grant, and Garfield. Then there were
a number of framed mottos: "Education rules in America," "Rely on
yourself," "God is our hope," "Dare to say No," "Knowledge is power,"
"Education is the chief defense of nations."

But none of these things made Tillie's genius to burn, and again her
eyes wandered to the window and gazed out into the blue sky; and after
a few moments she suddenly turned to her desk and rapidly wrote down
her "subject"--"Evening."

The mountain of the opening sentence being crossed, the rest went
smoothly enough, for Tillie wrote it from her heart.


"EVENING.

"I love to take my little sisters and brothers and go out, still, on a
hill-top when the sun is setting so red in the West, and the birds are
singing around us, and the cows are coming home to be milked, and the
men are returning from their day's work.

"I would love to play in the evening if I had the dare, when the
children are gay and everything around me is happy.

"I love to see the flowers closing their buds when the shades of
evening are come. The thought has come to me, still, that I hope the
closing of my life may come as quiet and peaceful as the closing of the
flowers in the evening.

"MATILDA MARIA GETZ."


Miss Margaret was just calling for Absalom's synonyms when Tillie
carried her composition to the desk, and Absalom was replying with his
customary half-defiant sullenness.

"My pop he sayed I ain't got need to waste my time gettin' learnt them
cinnamons. Pop he says what's the use learnin' TWO words where [which]
means the selfsame thing--one's enough."

Absalom's father was a school director and Absalom had grown
accustomed, under the rule of Miss Margaret's predecessors, to feel the
force of the fact in their care not to offend him.

"But your father is not the teacher here--I am," she cheerfully told
him. "So you may stay after school and do what I require."

Tillie felt a pang of uneasiness as she went back to her seat.
Absalom's father was very influential and, as all the township knew,
very spiteful. He could send Miss Margaret away, and he would do it, if
she offended his only child, Absalom. Tillie thought she could not bear
it at all if Miss Margaret were sent away. Poor Miss Margaret did not
seem to realize her own danger. Tillie felt tempted to warn her. It was
only this morning that the teacher had laughed at Absalom when he said
that the Declaration of Independence was "a treaty between the United
States and England,"--and had asked him, "Which country, do you think,
hurrahed the loudest, Absalom, when that treaty was signed?" And now
this afternoon she "as much as said Absalom's father should mind to his
own business!" It was growing serious. There had never been before a
teacher at William Penn school-house who had not judiciously "showed
partiality" to Absalom.

"And he used to be dummer yet [stupider even] than what he is now,"
thought Tillie, remembering vividly a school entertainment that had
been given during her own first year at school, when Absalom, nine
years old, had spoken his first piece. His pious Methodist grandmother
had endeavored to teach him a little hymn to speak on the great
occasion, while his frivolous aunt from the city of Lancaster had tried
at the same time to teach him "Bobby Shafto." New Canaan audiences were
neither discriminating nor critical, but the assembly before which
little Absalom had risen to "speak his piece off," had found themselves
confused when he told them that

  "On Jordan's bank the Baptist stands,
    Silver buckles on his knee."

Tillie would never forget her own infantine agony of suspense as she
sat, a tiny girl of five, in the audience, listening to Absalom's
mistakes. But Eli Darmstetter, the teacher, had not scolded him.

Then there was the time that Absalom had forced a fight at recess and
had made little Adam Oberholzer's nose bleed--it was little Adam (whose
father was not at that time a school director) that had to stay after
school; and though every one knew it wasn't fair, it had been accepted
without criticism, because even the young rising generation of New
Canaan understood the impossibility and folly of quarreling with one's
means of earning money.

But Miss Margaret appeared to be perfectly blind to the perils of her
position. Tillie was deeply troubled about it.

At half-past three, when, at a nod from Miss Margaret the little girl
left her desk to go home, a wonderful thing happened--Miss Margaret
gave her a story-book.

"You are so fond of reading, Tillie, I brought you this. You may take
it home, and when you have read it, bring it back to me, and I'll give
you something else to read."

Delighted as Tillie was to have the book for its own sake, it was yet
greater happiness to handle something belonging to Miss Margaret and to
realize that Miss Margaret had thought so much about her as to bring it
to her.

"It's a novel, Tillie. Have you ever read a novel?"

"No'm. Only li-bries."

"What?"

"Sunday-school li-bries. Us we're Evangelicals, and us children we go
to the Sunday-school, and I still bring home li-bry books. Pop he don't
uphold to novel-readin'. I have never saw a novel yet."

"Well, this book won't injure you, Tillie. You must tell me all about
it when you have read it. You will find it so interesting, I'm afraid
you won't be able to study your lessons while you are reading it."

Outside the school-room, Tillie looked at the title,--Ivanhoe,"--and
turned over the pages in an ecstasy of anticipation.

"Oh! I love her! I love her!" throbbed her little hungry heart.




II

"I'M GOING TO LEARN YOU ONCE!"


Tillie was obliged, when about a half-mile from her father's farm, to
hide her precious book. This she did by pinning her petticoat into a
bag and concealing the book in it. It was in this way that she always
carried home her "li-bries" from Sunday-school, for all story-book
reading was prohibited by her father. It was uncomfortable walking
along the highroad with the book knocking against her legs at every
step, but that was not so painful as her father's punishment would be
did he discover her bringing home a "novel"! She was not permitted to
bring home even a school-book, and she had greatly astonished Miss
Margaret, one day at the beginning of the term, by asking, "Please,
will you leave me let my books in school? Pop says I darsen't bring 'em
home."

"What you can't learn in school, you can do without," Tillie's father
had said. "When you're home you'll work fur your wittles."

Tillie's father was a frugal, honest, hard-working, and very prosperous
Pennsylvania Dutch farmer, who thought he religiously performed his
parental duty in bringing up his many children in the fear of his heavy
hand, in unceasing labor, and in almost total abstinence from all
amusement and self-indulgence. Far from thinking himself cruel, he was
convinced that the oftener and the more vigorously he applied "the
strap," the more conscientious a parent was he.

His wife, Tillie's stepmother, was as submissive to his authority as
were her five children and Tillie. Apathetic, anemic, overworked, she
yet never dreamed of considering herself or her children abused,
accepting her lot as the natural one of woman, who was created to be a
child-bearer, and to keep man well fed and comfortable. The only
variation from the deadly monotony of her mechanical and unceasing
labor was found in her habit of irritability with her stepchild. She
considered Tillie "a dopple" (a stupid, awkward person); for though
usually a wonderful little household worker, Tillie, when very much
tired out, was apt to drop dishes; and absent-mindedly she would put
her sunbonnet instead of the bread into the oven, or pour molasses
instead of batter on the griddle. Such misdemeanors were always
plaintively reported by Mrs. Getz to Tillie's father, who, without
fail, conscientiously applied what he considered the undoubted cure.

In practising the strenuous economy prescribed by her husband, Mrs.
Getz had to manoeuver very skilfully to keep her children decently
clothed, and Tillie in this matter was a great help to her; for the
little girl possessed a precocious skill in combining a pile of patches
into a passably decent dress or coat for one of her little brothers or
sisters. Nevertheless, it was invariably Tillie who was slighted in the
small expenditures that were made each year for the family clothing.
The child had always really preferred that the others should have "new
things" rather than herself--until Miss Margaret came; and now, before
Miss Margaret's daintiness, she felt ashamed of her own shabby
appearance and longed unspeakably for fresh, pretty clothes. Tillie
knew perfectly well that her father had plenty of money to buy them for
her if he would. But she never thought of asking him or her stepmother
for anything more than what they saw fit to give her.

The Getz family was a perfectly familiar type among the German farming
class of southeastern Pennsylvania. Jacob Getz, though spoken of in the
neighborhood as being "wonderful near," which means very penurious, and
considered by the more gentle-minded Amish and Mennonites of the
township to be "overly strict" with his family and "too ready with the
strap still," was nevertheless highly respected as one who worked hard
and was prosperous, lived economically, honestly, and in the fear of
the Lord, and was "laying by."

The Getz farm was typical of the better sort to be found in that
county. A neat walk, bordered by clam shells, led from a wooden gate to
the porch of a rather large, and severely plain frame house, facing the
road. Every shutter on the front and sides of the building was tightly
closed, and there was no sign of life about the place. A stranger,
ignorant of the Pennsylvania Dutch custom of living in the kitchen and
shutting off the "best rooms,"--to be used in their mustiness and stiff
unhomelikeness on Sunday only,--would have thought the house
temporarily empty. It was forbiddingly and uncompromisingly
spick-and-span.

A grass-plot, ornamented with a circular flower-bed, extended a short
distance on either side of the house. But not too much land was put to
such unproductive use; and the small lawn was closely bordered by a
corn-field on the one side and on the other by an apple orchard. Beyond
stretched the tobacco--and wheat-fields, and behind the house were the
vegetable garden and the barn-yard.

Arrived at home by half-past three, Tillie hid her "Ivanhoe" under the
pillow of her bed when she went up-stairs to change her faded calico
school dress for the yet older garment she wore at her work.

If she had not been obliged to change her dress, she would have been
puzzled to know how to hide her book, for she could not, without
creating suspicion, have gone up-stairs in the daytime. In New Canaan
one never went up-stairs during the day, except at the rare times when
obliged to change one's clothes. Every one washed at the pump and used
the one family roller-towel hanging on the porch. Miss Margaret, ever
since her arrival in the neighborhood, had been the subject of
wide-spread remark and even suspicion, because she "washed up-stairs"
and even sat up-stairs!--in her bedroom! It was an unheard-of
proceeding in New Canaan.

Tillie helped her father in the celery-beds until dark; then, weary,
but excited at the prospect of her book, she went in from the fields
and up-stairs to the little low-roofed bed-chamber which she shared
with her two half-sisters. They were already in bed and asleep, as was
their mother in the room across the hall, for every one went to bed at
sundown in Canaan Township, and got up at sunrise.

Tillie was in bed in a few minutes, rejoicing in the feeling of the
book under her pillow. Not yet dared she venture to light a candle and
read it--not until she should hear her father's heavy snoring in the
room across the hall.

The candles which she used for this surreptitious reading of
Sunday-school "li-bries" and any other chance literature which fell in
her way, were procured with money paid to her by Miss Margaret for
helping her to clean the school-room on Friday afternoons after school.
Tillie would have been happy to help her for the mere joy of being with
her, but Miss Margaret insisted upon paying her ten cents for each such
service.

The little girl was obliged to resort to a deep-laid plot in order to
do this work for the teacher. It had been her father's custom--ever
since, at the age of five, she had begun to go to school--to "time" her
in coming home at noon and afternoon, and whenever she was not there on
the minute, to mete out to her a dose of his ever-present strap.

"I ain't havin' no playin' on the way home, still! When school is done,
you come right away home then, to help me or your mom, or I 'll learn
you once!"

But it happened that Miss Margaret, in her reign at "William Perm"
school-house, had introduced the innovation of closing school on Friday
afternoons at half-past three instead of four, and Tillie, with bribes
of candy bought with part of her weekly wage of ten cents, secured
secrecy as to this innovation from her little sister and brother who
went to school with her--making them play in the school-grounds until
she was ready to go home with them.

Before Miss Margaret had come to New Canaan, Tillie had done her
midnight reading by the light of the kerosene lamp which, after every
one was asleep, she would bring up from the kitchen to her bedside. But
this was dangerous, as it often led to awkward inquiries as to the
speedy consumption of the oil. Candles were safer. Tillie kept them and
a box of matches hidden under the mattress.

It was eleven o'clock when at last the child, trembling with mingled
delight and apprehension, rose from her bed, softly closed her bedroom
door, and with extremely judicious carefulness lighted her candle,
propped up her pillow, and settled down to read as long as she should
be able to hold her eyes open. The little sister at her side and the
one in the bed at the other side of the room slept too soundly to be
disturbed by the faint flickering light of that one candle.

To-night her stolen pleasure proved more than usually engrossing. At
first the book was interesting principally because of the fact, so
vividly present with her, that Miss Margaret's eyes and mind had moved
over every word and thought which, she was now absorbing. But soon her
intense interest in the story excluded every other idea--even the fear
of discovery. Her young spirit was "out of the body" and following, as
in a trance, this tale, the like of which she had never before read.

The clock down-stairs in the kitchen struck twelve--one--two, but
Tillie never heard it. At half-past two o'clock in the morning, when
the tallow candle was beginning to sputter to its end, she still was
reading, her eyes bright as stars, her usually pale face flushed with
excitement, her sensitive lips parted in breathless interest--when,
suddenly, a stinging blow of "the strap" on her shoulders brought from
her a cry of pain and fright.

"What you mean, doin' somepin like, this yet!" sternly demanded her
father. "What fur book's that there?"

He took the book from her hands and Tillie cowered beneath the covers,
the wish flashing through her mind that the book could change into a
Bible as he looked at it!--which miracle would surely temper the
punishment that in a moment she knew would be meted out to her.

"'Iwanhoe'--a novel! A NOVEL!" he said in genuine horror. "Tillie,
where d'you get this here!"

Tillie knew that if she told lies she would go to hell, but she
preferred to burn in torment forever rather than betray Miss Margaret;
for her father, like Absalom's, was a school director, and if he knew
Miss Margaret read novels and lent them to the children, he would
surely force her out of "William Penn."

"I lent it off of Elviny Dinkleberger!" she sobbed.

"You know I tole you a'ready you darsen't bring books home! And you
know I don't uphold to novel-readin'! I 'll have to learn you to mind
better 'n this! Where d' you get that there candle?"

"I--bought it, pop."

"Bought? Where d'you get the money!"

Tillie did not like the lies she had to tell, but she knew she had
already perjured her soul beyond redemption and one lie more or less
could not make matters worse.

"I found it in the road."

"How much did you find?"

"Fi' cents."

"You hadn't ought to spent it without astin' me dare you. Now I'm goin'
to learn you once! Set up."

Tillie obeyed, and the strap fell across her shoulders. Her outcries
awakened the household and started the youngest little sister, in her
fright and sympathy with Tillie, to a high-pitched wailing. The rest of
them took the incident phlegmatically, the only novelty about it being
the strange hour of its happening.

But the hardest part of her punishment was to follow.

"Now this here book goes in the fire!" her father announced when at
last his hand was stayed. "And any more that comes home goes after it
in the stove, I'll see if you 'll mind your pop or not!"

Left alone in her bed, her body quivering, her little soul hot with
shame and hatred, the child stifled her sobs in her pillow, her whole
heart one bleeding wound.

How could she ever tell Miss Margaret? Surely she would never like her
any more!--never again lay her hand on her hair, or praise her
compositions, or call her "honey," or, even, perhaps, allow her to help
her on Fridays!--and what, then, would be the use of living? If only
she could die and be dead like a cat or a bird and not go to hell, she
would take the carving-knife and kill herself! But there was hell to be
taken into consideration. And yet, could hell hold anything worse than
the loss of Miss Margaret's kindness? HOW could she tell her of that
burned-up book and endure to see her look at her with cold disapproval?
Oh, to make such return for her kindness, when she so longed with all
her soul to show her how much she loved her!

For the first time in all her school-days, Tillie went next morning
with reluctance to school.




III

"WHAT'S HURTIN' YOU, TILLIE?"


She meant to make her confession as soon as she reached the
school-house--and have it over--but Miss Margaret was busy writing on
the blackboard, and Tillie felt an immense relief at the necessary
postponement of her ordeal to recess time.

The hours of that morning were very long to her heavy heart, and the
minutes dragged to the time of her doom--for nothing but blackness lay
beyond the point of the acknowledgment which must turn her teacher's
fondness to dislike.

She saw Miss Margaret's eyes upon her several times during the morning,
with that look of anxious concern which had so often fed her starved
affections. Yes, Miss Margaret evidently could see that she was in
trouble and she was feeling sorry for her. But, alas, when she should
learn the cause of her misery, how surely would that look turn to
coldness and displeasure!

Tillie felt that she was ill preparing the way for her dread confession
in the very bad recitations she made all morning. She failed in
geography--every question that came to her; she failed to understand
Miss Margaret's explanation of compound interest, though the
explanation was gone over a third time for her especial benefit; she
missed five words in spelling and two questions in United States
history!

"Tillie, Tillie!" Miss Margaret solemnly shook her head, as she closed
her book at the end of the last recitation before recess. "Too much
'Ivanhoe,' I'm afraid! Well, it's my fault, isn't it?"

The little girl's blue eyes gazed up at her with a look of such
anguish, that impulsively Miss Margaret drew her to her side, as the
rest of the class moved away to their seats.

"What's the matter, dear?" she asked. "Aren't you well? You look pale
and ill! What is it, Tillie?"

Tillie's overwrought heart could bear no more. Her head fell on Miss
Margaret's shoulder as she broke into wildest crying. Her body quivered
with her gasping sobs and her little hands clutched convulsively at
Miss Margaret's gown.

"You poor little thing!" whispered Miss Margaret, her arms about the
child; "WHAT'S the matter with you, honey? There, there, don't cry
so--tell me what's the matter."

It was such bliss to be petted like this--to feel Miss Margaret's arms
about her and hear that loved voice so close to her!--for the last
time! Never again after this moment would she be liked and caressed!
Her heart was breaking and she could not answer for her sobbing.

"Tillie, dear, sit down here in my chair until I send the other
children out to recess--and then you and I can have a talk by
ourselves," Miss Margaret said, leading the child a step to her
arm-chair on the platform. She stood beside the chair, holding Tillie's
throbbing head to her side, while she tapped the bell which dismissed
the children.

"Now," she said, when the door had closed on the last of them and she
had seated herself and drawn Tillie to her again, "tell me what you are
crying for, little girlie."

"Miss Margaret!" Tillie's words came in hysterical, choking gasps; "you
won't never like me no more when I tell you what's happened, Miss
Margaret!"

"Why, dear me, Tillie, what on earth is it?"

"I didn't mean to do it, Miss Margaret! And I'll redd up for you,
Fridays, still, till it's paid for a'ready, Miss Margaret, if you'll
leave me, won't you, please? Oh, won't you never like me no more?"

"My dear little goosie, what IS the matter with you? Come," she said,
taking the little girl's hand reassuringly in both her own, "tell me,
child."

A certain note of firmness in her usually drawling Southern voice
checked a little the child's hysterical emotion. She gulped the choking
lump in her throat and answered.

"I was readin' 'Ivanhoe' in bed last night, and pop woke up, and seen
my candle-light, and he conceited he'd look once and see what it was,
and then he seen me, and he don't uphold to novel-readin', and he--he--"

"Well?" Miss Margaret gently urged her faltering speech.

"He whipped me and--and burnt up your Book!"

"Whipped you again!" Miss Margaret's soft voice indignantly exclaimed.
"The br--" she checked herself and virtuously closed her lips. "I'm so
sorry, Tillie, that I got you into such a scrape!"

Tillie thought Miss Margaret could not have heard her clearly.

"He--burnt up your book yet, Miss Margaret!" she found voice to whisper
again.

"Indeed! I ought to make him pay for it!"

"He didn't know it was yourn, Miss Margaret--he don't uphold to
novel-readin', and if he'd know it was yourn he'd have you put out of
William Penn, so I tole him I lent it off of Elviny Dinkleberger--and
I'll help you Fridays till it's paid for a'ready, if you'll leave me,
Miss Margaret!"

She lifted pleading eyes to the teacher's face, to see therein a look
of anger such as she had never before beheld in that gentle
countenance--for Miss Margaret had caught sight of the marks of the
strap on Tillie's bare neck, and she was flushed with indignation at
the outrage. But Tillie, interpreting the anger to be against herself,
turned as white as death, and a look of such hopeless woe came into her
face that Miss Margaret suddenly realized the dread apprehension
torturing the child.

"Come here to me, you poor little thing!" she tenderly exclaimed,
drawing the little girl into her lap and folding her to her heart. "I
don't care anything about the BOOK, honey! Did you think I would?
There, there--don't cry so, Tillie, don't cry. _I_ love you, don't you
know I do!"--and Miss Margaret kissed the child's quivering lips, and
with her own fragrant handkerchief wiped the tears from her cheeks, and
with her soft, cool fingers smoothed back the hair from her hot
forehead.

And this child, who had never known the touch of a mother's hand and
lips, was transported in that moment from the suffering of the past
night and morning, to a happiness that made this hour stand out to her,
in all the years that followed, as the one supreme experience of her
childhood.

Ineffable tenderness of the mother heart of woman!

That afternoon, when Tillie got home from school,--ten minutes late
according to the time allowed her by her father,--she was quite unable
to go out to help him in the field. Every step of the road home had
been a dragging burden to her aching limbs, and the moment she reached
the farm-house, she tumbled in a little heap upon the kitchen settee
and lay there, exhausted and white, her eyes shining with fever, her
mouth parched with thirst, her head throbbing with pain--feeling
utterly indifferent to the consequences of her tardiness and her
failure to meet her father in the field.

"Ain't you feelin' good?" her stepmother phlegmatically inquired from
across the room, where she sat with a dish-pan in her lap, paring
potatoes for supper.

"No, ma'am," weakly answered Tillie.

"Pop 'll be looking fur you out in the field."

Tillie wearily closed her eyes and did not answer.

Mrs. Getz looked up from her pan and let her glance rest for an instant
upon the child's white, pained face. "Are you feelin' too mean to go
help pop?"

"Yes, ma'am. I--can't!" gasped Tillie, with a little sob.

"You ain't lookin' good," the woman reluctantly conceded. "Well, I'll
leave you lay a while. Mebbe pop used the strap too hard last night. He
sayed this dinner that he was some uneasy that he used the strap so
hard--but he was that wonderful spited to think you'd set up readin' a
novel-book in the night-time yet! You might of knew you'd ketch an
awful lickin' fur doin' such a dumm thing like what that was. Sammy!"
she called to her little eight-year-old son, who was playing on the
kitchen porch, "you go out and tell pop Tillie she's got sick fur me,
and I'm leavin' her lay a while. Now hurry on, or he'll come in here to
see, once, ain't she home yet, or what. Go on now!"

Sammy departed on his errand, and Mrs. Getz diligently resumed her
potato-paring.

"I don't know what pop'll say to you not comin' out to help," she
presently remarked.

Tillie's head moved restlessly, but she did not speak. She was past
caring what her father might say or do.

Mrs. Getz thoughtfully considered a doubtful potato, and, concluding at
length to discard it, "I guess," she said, throwing it back into the
pan, "I'll let that one; it's some poor. Do you feel fur eatin' any
supper?" she asked. "I'm havin' fried smashed-potatoes and wieners
[Frankfort sausages]. Some days I just don't know what to cook all."

Tillie's lips moved, but gave no sound.

"I guess you're right down sick fur all; ain't? I wonder if pop'll have
Doc in. He won't want to spend any fur that. But you do look wonderful
bad. It's awful onhandy comin' just to-day. I did feel fur sayin' to
pop I'd go to the rewiwal to-night, of he didn't mind. It's a while
back a'ready since I was to a meetin'--not even on a funeral. And they
say they do now make awful funny up at Bethel rewiwal this week. I was
thinkin' I'd go once. But if you can't redd up after supper and help
milk and put the childern to bed, I can't go fur all."

No response from Tillie.

Mrs. Getz sighed her disappointment as she went on with her work.
Presently she spoke again. "This after, a lady agent come along. She
had such a complexion lotion. She talked near a half-hour. She was,
now, a beautiful conversationist! I just set and listened. Then she was
some spited that I wouldn't buy a box of complexion lotion off of her.
But she certainly was, now, a beautiful conversationist!"

The advent of an agent in the neighborhood was always a noteworthy
event, and Tillie's utterly indifferent reception of the news that
to-day one had "been along" made Mrs. Getz look at her wonderingly.

"Are you too sick to take interest?" she asked.

The child made no answer. The woman rose to put her potatoes on the
stove.

It was an hour later when, as Tillie still lay motionless on the
settee, and Mrs. Getz was dishing up the supper and putting it on the
table, which stood near the wall at one end of the kitchen, Mr. Getz
came in, tired, dirty, and hungry, from the celery-beds.

The child opened her eyes at the familiar and often dreaded step, and
looked up at him as he came and stood over her.

"What's the matter? What's hurtin' you, Tillie?" he asked, an unwonted
kindness in his voice as he saw how ill the little girl looked.

"I don'--know," Tillie whispered, her heavy eyelids falling again.

"You don' know! You can't be so worse if you don' know what's hurtin'
you! Have you fever, or the headache, or whatever?"

He laid his rough hand on her forehead and passed it over her cheek.

"She's some feverish," he said, turning to his wife, who was busy at
the stove. "Full much so!"

"She had the cold a little, and I guess she's took more to it," Mrs.
Getz returned, bearing the fried potatoes across the kitchen to the
table.

"I heard the Doc talkin' there's smallpox handy to us, only a mile away
at New Canaan," said Getz, a note of anxiety in his voice that made the
sick child wearily marvel. Why was he anxious about her? she wondered.
It wasn't because he liked her, as Miss Margaret did. He was afraid of
catching smallpox himself, perhaps. Or he was afraid she would be
unable to help him to-morrow, and maybe for many days, out in the
celery-beds. That was why he spoke anxiously--not because he liked her
and was sorry.

No bitterness was mingled with Tillie's quite matter-of-fact acceptance
of these conclusions.

"It would be a good much trouble to us if she was took down with the
smallpox," Mrs. Getz's tired voice replied.

"I guess not as much as it would be to HER," the father said, a rough
tenderness in his voice, and something else which Tillie vaguely felt
to be a note of pain.

"Are you havin' the Doc in fur her, then?" his wife asked.

"I guess I better, mebbe," the man hesitated. His thrifty mind shrank
at the thought of the expense.

He turned again to Tillie and bent over her.

"Can't you tell pop what's hurtin' you, Tillie?"

"No--sir."

Mr. Getz looked doubtfully and rather helplessly at his wife. "It's a
bad sign, ain't, when they can't tell what's hurtin' 'em?"

"I don't know what fur sign that is when they don't feel nothin'," she
stoically answered, as she dished up her Frankfort sausages.

"If a person would just know oncet!" he exclaimed anxiously. "Anyhow,
she's pretty much sick--she looks it so! I guess I better mebbe not
take no risks. I'll send fur Doc over. Sammy can go, then."

"All right. Supper's ready now. You can come eat."

She went to the door to call the children in front the porch and the
lawn; and Mr. Getz again bent over the child.

"Can you eat along, Tillie?"

Tillie weakly shook her head.

"Don't you feel fur your wittles?"

"No--sir."

"Well, well. I'll send fur the Doc, then, and he can mebbe give you
some pills, or what, to make you feel some better; ain't?" he said,
again passing his rough hand over her forehead and cheek, with a touch
as nearly like a caress as anything Tillie had ever known from him. The
tears welled up in her eyes and slowly rolled over her white face, as
she felt this unwonted expression of affection.

Her father turned away quickly and went to the table, about which the
children were gathering.

"Where's Sammy?" he asked his wife. "I'm sendin' him fur the Doc after
supper."

"Where? I guess over," she motioned with her head as she lifted the
youngest, a one-year-old boy, into his high chair. "Over" was the
family designation for the pump, at which every child of a suitable age
was required to wash his face and hands before coming to the table.

While waiting for the arrival of the doctor, after supper, Getz
ineffectually tried to force Tillie to eat something. In his genuine
anxiety about her and his eagerness for "the Doc's" arrival, he quite
forgot about the fee which would have to be paid for the visit.




IV

"THE DOC" COMBINES BUSINESS AND PLEASURE


Miss Margaret boarded at the "hotel" of New Canaan. As the only other
regular boarder was the middle-aged, rugged, unkempt little man known
as "the Doc," and as the transient guests were very few and far
between, Miss Margaret shared the life of the hotel-keeper's family on
an intimate and familiar footing.

The invincible custom of New Canaan of using a bedroom only at night
made her unheard-of inclination to sit in her room during the day or
before bedtime the subject of so much comment and wonder that, feeling
it best to yield to the prejudice, she usually read, sewed, or wrote
letters in the kitchen, or, when a fire was lighted, in the combination
dining-room and sitting-room.

It was the evening of the day of Tillie's confession about "Ivanhoe,"
and Miss Margaret, after the early supper-hour of the country hotel,
had gone to the sitting-room, removed the chenille cover from the
centre-table, uncorked the bottle of fluid sold at the village store as
ink, but looking more like raspberryade, and settled herself to write,
to one deeply interested in everything which interested her, an account
of her day and its episode with the little daughter of Jacob Getz.

This room in which she sat, like all other rooms of the district, was
too primly neat to be cozy or comfortable. It contained a bright new
rag carpet, a luridly painted wooden settee, a sewing-machine, and
several uninviting wooden chairs. Margaret often yearned to pull the
pieces of furniture out from their stiff, sentinel-like stations
against the wall and give to the room that divine touch of homeyness
which it lacked. But she did not dare venture upon such a liberty.

Very quickly absorbed in her letter-writing, she did not notice the
heavy footsteps which presently sounded across the floor and paused at
her chair.

"Now that there writin'--" said a gruff voice at her shoulder; and,
startled, she quickly turned in her chair, to find the other boarder,
"the Doc," leaning on the back of it, his shaggy head almost on a level
with her fair one.

"That there writin'," pursued the doctor, continuing to hold his fat
head in unabashed proximity to her own and to her letter, "is wonderful
easy to read. Wonderful easy."

Miss Margaret promptly covered her letter with a blotter, corked the
raspberry-ade, and rose.

"Done a'ready?" asked the doctor.

"For the present, yes."

"See here oncet, Teacher!"

He suddenly fixed her with his small, keen eyes as he drew from the
pocket of his shabby, dusty coat a long, legal-looking paper.

"I have here," he said impressively, "an important dokiment, Teacher,
concerning of which I desire to consult you perfessionally."

"Yes?"

"You just stay settin'; I'll fetch a chair and set aside of you and
show it to you oncet."

He drew a chair up to the table and Margaret reluctantly sat down,
feeling annoyed and disappointed at this interruption of her letter,
yet unwilling, in the goodness of her heart, to snub the little man.

The doctor bent near to her and spoke confidentially.

"You see, them swanged fools in the legislature has went to work and
passed a act--ag'in' my protest, mind you--compellin' doctors to fill
out blanks answerin' to a lot of darn-fool questions 'bout one thing
and 'nother, like this here."

He had spread open on the table the paper he had drawn from his pocket.
It was soiled from contact with his coat and his hands, and Margaret,
instead of touching the sheet, pressed it down with the handle of her
pen.

The doctor noticed the act and laughed. "You're wonderful easy
kreistled [disgusted]; ain't? I took notice a'ready how when things is
some dirty they kreistle you, still. But indeed, Teacher," he gravely
added, "it ain't healthy to wash so much and keep so clean as what you
do. It's weakenin'. That's why city folks ain't so hearty--they get
right into them big, long tubs they have built in their houses
up-stairs! I seen one oncet in at Doc Hess's in Lancaster. I says to
him when I seen it, 'You wouldn't get me into THAT--it's too much like
a coffin!' I says. 'It would make a body creepy to get in there.' And
he says, 'I'd feel creepy if I DIDN'T get in.' 'Yes,' I says,'that's
why you're so thin. You wash yourself away,' I says."

"What's it all about?" Miss Margaret abruptly asked, examining the
paper.

"These here's the questions," answered the doctor, tracing them with
his thick, dirty forefinger; "and these here's the blank spaces fur to
write the answers into. Now you can write better 'n me, Teacher; and if
you'll just take and write in the answers fur me, why, I'll do a favor
fur you some time if ever you ast it off of me. And if ever you need a
doctor, just you call on me, and I'm swanged if I charge you a cent!"

Among the simple population of New Canaan the Doc was considered the
most blasphemous man in America, but there seemed to be a sort of
general impression in the village that his profanity was, in some way,
an eccentricity of genius.

"Thank you," Miss Margaret responded to his offer of free medical
services. "I'll fill out the paper for you with pleasure."

She read aloud the first question of the list. '"Where did you attend
lectures?'"

Her pen suspended over the paper, she looked at him inquiringly.
"Well?" she asked.

"Lekshures be blowed!" he exclaimed. "I ain't never 'tended no
lekshures!"

"Oh!" said Miss Margaret, nodding conclusively. "Well, then, let us
pass on to the next question. 'To what School of Medicine do you
belong?'"

"School?" repeated the doctor; "I went to school right here in this
here town--it's better 'n thirty years ago, a'ready."

"No," Miss Margaret explained, "that's not the question. 'To what
School of MEDICINE do you belong?' Medicine, you know," she repeated,
as though talking to a deaf person.

"Oh," said the doctor, "medicine, is it? I never have went to none," he
announced defiantly. "I studied medicine in old Doctor Johnson's office
and learnt it by practisin' it. That there's the only way to learn any
business. Do you suppose you could learn a boy carpenterin' by settin'
him down to read books on sawin' boards and a-lekshurin' him on drivin'
nails? No more can you make a doctor in no such swanged-fool way like
that there!"

"But," said Margaret, "the question means do you practise allopathy,
homeopathy, hydropathy, osteopathy,--or, for instance, eclecticism? Are
you, for example, a homeopathist?"

"Gosh!" said the doctor, looking at her admiringly, "I'm blamed if you
don't know more big words than I ever seen in a spellin'-book or heard
at a spellin'-bee! Home-o-pathy? No, sir! When I give a dose to a
patient, still, he 'most always generally finds it out, and pretty
gosh-hang quick too! When he gits a dose of my herb bitters he knows it
good enough. Be sure, I don't give babies, and so forth, doses like
them. All such I treat, still, according to home-o-pathy, and not like
that swanged fool, Doc Hess, which only last week he give a baby a dose
fitten only fur a field-hand--and HE went to college!--Oh, yes!--and
heerd lekshures too! Natural consequence, the baby up't and died fur
'em. But growed folks they need allopathy."

"Then," said Margaret, "you might be called an eclectic?"

"A eclectic?" the doctor inquiringly repeated, rubbing his nose. "To be
sure, I know in a general way what a eclectic IS, and so forth. But
what would YOU mean, anyhow, by a eclectic doctor, so to speak, heh?"

"An eclectic," Margaret explained, "is one who claims to adopt whatever
is good and reject whatever is bad in every system or school of
medicine."

"If that ain't a description of me yet!" exclaimed the doctor,
delighted. "Write 'em down, Teacher! I'm a--now what d'you call 'em?"

"You certainly are a what-do-you-call-'em!" thought Margaret--but she
gravely repeated, "An eclectic," and wrote the name in the blank space.

"And here I've been practisin' that there style of medicine fur fifteen
years without oncet suspicioning it! That is," he quickly corrected
himself, in some confusion, "I haven't, so to speak, called it pretty
often a eclectic, you see, gosh hang it! and--YOU understand, don't
you, Teacher?"

Margaret understood very well indeed, but she put the question by.

The rest of the blank was filled with less difficulty, and in a few
minutes the paper was folded and returned to the doctor's pocket.

"I'm much obliged to you, Teacher," he said heartily. "And mind, now,"
he added, leaning far back in his chair, crossing his legs, thrusting
his thumbs into his vest pockets, and letting his eyes rest upon her,
"if ever you want a doctor, I ain't chargin' you nothin'; and leave me
tell you somethin'," he said, emphasizing each word by a shake of his
forefinger, "Jake Getz and Nathaniel Puntz they're the two school
directors that 'most always makes trouble fur the teacher. And I pass
you my word that if they get down on you any, and want to chase you off
your job, I'm standin' by you--I pass you my word!"

"Thank you. But what would they get down on me for?"

"Well, if Jake Getz saw you standin' up for his childern against his
lickin' 'em or makin' 'em work hard; or if you wanted to make 'em take
time to learn their books at home when he wants 'em to work--or some
such--he'd get awful down on you. And Nathaniel Puntz he 's just the
conTRARY--he wants his n' spoiled--he's got but the one."

Miss Margaret recalled with a little thrill the loyalty with which
Tillie had tried to save her from her father's anger by telling him
that Elviny Dinkleberger had lent her "Ivanhoe." "I suppose I had a
narrow escape there," she thought. "Poor little Tillie! She is so
conscientious--I can fancy what that lie cost her!"

Gathering up her stationery, she made a movement to rise--but the
doctor checked her with a question.

"Say! Not that I want to ast questions too close--but what was you
writin', now, in that letter of yourn, about Jake Getz?"

Miss Margaret was scarcely prepared for the question. She stared at the
man for an instant, then helplessly laughed at him.

"Well," he said apologetically, "I don't mean to be inquisitive that
way--but sometimes I speak unpolite too--fur all I've saw high society
a'ready!" he added, on the defensive. "Why, here one time I went in to
Lancaster City to see Doc Hess, and he wouldn't have it no other way
but I should stay and eat along. 'Och,' I says, 'I don't want to, I'm
so common that way, and I know yous are tony and it don't do. I'll just
pick a piece [have luncheon] at the tavern,' I says. But no, he says I
was to come eat along. So then I did. And his missus she was wonderful
fashionable, but she acted just that nice and common with me as my own
mother or my wife yet. And that was the first time I have eat what the
noos-papers calls a course dinner. They was three courses. First they
was soup and nothin' else settin' on the table, and then a colored
young lady come in with such a silver pan and such a flat, wide knife,
and she scraped the crumbs off between every one of them three courses.
I felt awful funny. I tell you they was tony. I sayed to the missus, 'I
hadn't ought to of came here. I'm not grand enough like yous'; but she
sayed, 'It's nothing of the kind, and you're always welcome.' Yes, she
made herself that nice and common!" concluded the doctor. "So you see I
have saw high society."

"Yes," Miss Margaret assented.

"Say!" he suddenly put another question to her. "Why don't you get
married?"

"Well," she parried, "why don't YOU?"

"I was married a'ready. My wife she died fur me. She was layin' three
months. She got so sore layin'. It was when we was stoppin' over in
Chicago yet. That's out in Illinois. Then, when she died,--och," he
said despondently, "there fur a while I didn't take no interest in
nothin' no more. When your wife dies, you don't feel fur nothin'. Yes,
yes," he sighed, "people have often troubles! Oh," he granted, "I went
to see other women since. But," shaking his head in discouragement, "it
didn't go. I think I'm better off if I stay single. Yes, I stay single
yet. Well," he reconsidered the question, his head on one side as he
examined the fair lady before him, "if I could get one to suit me
oncet."

Miss Margaret grew alarmed. But the doctor complacently continued,
"When my wife died fur me I moved fu'ther west, and I got out as fur as
Utah yet. That's where they have more 'n one wife. I thought, now, that
there was a poor practice! One woman would do ME. Say!" he again fixed
her with his eye.

"What?"

"Do you like your job?"

"Well," she tentatively answered, "it's not uninteresting."

"Would you ruther keep your job than quit and get married?"

"That depends--"

"Or," quickly added the doctor, "you might jus keep on teachin' the
school after you was married, if you married some one livin' right
here. Ain't? And if you kep' on the right side of the School Board.
Unlest you'd ruther marry a town fellah and give up your job out here.
Some thinks the women out here has to work too hard; but if they
married a man where [who] was well fixed," he said, insinuatingly, "he
could hire fur 'em [keep a servant]. Now, there's me. I'm well fixed. I
got money plenty."

"You are very fortunate," said Miss Margaret, sympathetically.

"Yes, ain't? And I ain't got no one dependent on me, neither. No
brothers, no sisters, no--wife--" he looked at her with an ingratiating
smile. "Some says I'm better off that way, but sometimes I think
different. Sometimes I think I'd like a wife oncet."

"Yes?" said Miss Margaret.

"Um--m," nodded the doctor. "Yes, and I'm pretty well fixed. I wasn't
always so comfortable off. It went a long while till I got to doin'
pretty good, and sometimes I got tired waitin' fur my luck to come. It
made me ugly dispositioned, my bad luck did. That's how I got in the
way of addicting to profane language. I sayed, still, I wisht, now, the
good Lord would try posperity on me fur a while--fur adwersity
certainly ain't makin' me a child of Gawd, I sayed. But now," he added,
rubbing his knees with satisfaction, "I'm fixed nice. Besides my
doctor's fees, I got ten acres, and three good hommies that'll be cows
till a little while yet. And that there organ in the front room is my
property. Bought it fifteen years ago on the instalment plan. I leave
missus keep it settin' in her parlor fur style that way. Do you play
the organ?"

"I CAN," was Miss Margaret's qualified answer.

"I always liked music--high-class music--like 'Pinnyfore.' That's a
nopery I heard in Lancaster there one time at the rooft-garden. That
was high-toned music, you bet. No trash about that. Gimme somepin nice
and ketchy. That's what I like. If it ain't ketchy, I don't take to it.
And so," he added admiringly, "you can play the organ too!"

"That's one of my distinguished accomplishments," said Miss Margaret.

"Well, say!" The doctor leaned forward and took her into his
confidence. "I don't mind if my wife is smart, so long as she don't
bother ME any!"

With this telling climax, the significance of which Miss Margaret could
hardly mistake, the doctor fell back again in his chair, and regarded
with complacency the comely young woman before him.

But before she could collect her shocked wits to reply, the entrance of
Jake Getz's son, Sammy, interrupted them. He had come into the house at
the kitchen door, and, having announced the object of his errand to the
landlady, who, by the way, was his father's sister, he was followed
into the sitting-room by a procession, consisting of his aunt, her
husband, and their two little daughters.

Sammy was able to satisfy but meagerly the eager curiosity or interest
of the household as to Tillie's illness, and his aunt, cousins, and
uncle presently returned to their work in the kitchen or out of doors,
while the doctor rose reluctantly to go to the stables to hitch up.

"Pop says to say you should hurry," said Sammy.

"There's time plenty," petulantly answered the doctor. "I conceited I'd
stay settin' with you this evening," he said regretfully to Miss
Margaret. "But a doctor can't never make no plans to stay no-wheres!
Well!" he sighed, "I'll go round back now and hitch a while."

"Sammy," said Miss Margaret, when she found herself alone with the
child, "wasn't your mother afraid YOU would get ill, coming over here,
on such a cool evening, barefooted?" "Och, no; she leaves me let my
shoes off near till it snows already. The teacher we had last year he
used to do worse 'n that yet!--HE'D WASH HIS FEET IN THE WINTER-TIME!"
said Sammy, in the tone of one relating a deed of valor. "I heard Aunty
Em speak how he washed 'em as much as oncet a week, still, IN WINTER!
The Doc he sayed no wonder that feller took cold!"

Miss Margaret gazed at the child with a feeling of fascination. "But,
Sammy," she said wonderingly, "your front porches get a weekly bath in
winter--do the people of New Canaan wash their porches oftener than
they wash themselves?"

"Porches gets dirty," reasoned Sammy. "Folks don't get dirty in
winter-time. Summer's the time they get dirty, and then they mebbe wash
in the run."

"Oh!" said Miss Margaret.

During the six weeks of her life in Canaan, she had never once seen in
this or any other household the least sign of any toilet appointments,
except a tin basin at the pump, a roller-towel on the porch, and a
small mirror in the kitchen. Tooth-brushes, she had learned, were
almost unknown in the neighborhood, nearly every one of more than
seventeen years wearing "store-teeth." It was a matter of much
speculation to her that these people, who thought it so essential to
keep their houses, especially their front porches, immaculately
scrubbed, should never feel an equal necessity as to their own persons.

The doctor came to the door and told Sammy he was ready. "I wouldn't do
it to go such a muddy night like what this is," he ruefully declared to
Miss Margaret, "if I didn't feel it was serious; Jake Getz wouldn't
spend any hirin' a doctor, without it was some serious. I'm sorry I got
to go."

"Good-night, Sammy," said Miss Margaret. "Give Tillie my love; and if
she is not able to come to school to-morrow, I shall go to see her."




V

"NOVELS AIN'T MORAL, DOC!"


Tillie still lay on the kitchen settee, her father sitting at her side,
when the doctor and Sammy arrived. The other children had all been put
to bed, and Mrs. Getz, seated at the kitchen table, was working on a
pile of mending by the light of a small lamp.

The doctor's verdict, when he had examined his patient's tongue, felt
her pulse, and taken her temperature, was not clear.

"She's got a high fever. That's 'a all the fu'ther I can go now. What
it may turn to till morning, I can't tell TILL morning. Give her these
powders every hour, without she's sleeping. That's the most that she
needs just now."

"Yes, if she can keep them powders down," said Mr. Getz, doubtfully.
"She can't keep nothin' with her."

"Well, keep on giving them, anyhow. She's a pretty sick child."

"You ain't no fears of smallpox, are you?" Mrs. Getz inquired. "Mister
was afraid it might mebbe be smallpox," she said, indicating her
husband by the epithet.

"Not that you say that I sayed it was!" Mr. Getz warned the doctor. "We
don't want no report put out! But is they any symptoms?"

"Och, no," the doctor reassured them. "It ain't smallpox. What did you
give her that she couldn't keep with her?"

"I fed some boiled milk to her."

"Did she drink tea?" he inquired, looking profound.

"We don't drink no store tea," Mrs. Getz answered him. "We drink
peppermint tea fur supper, still. Tillie she didn't drink none this
evening. Some says store tea's bad fur the nerves. I ain't got no
nerves," she went on placidly. "Leastways, I ain't never felt none, so
fur. Mister he likes the peppermint."

"And it comes cheaper," said Mister.

"Mebbe you've been leavin' Tillie work too much in the hot sun out in
the fields with you?" the doctor shot a keen glance at the father; for
Jake Getz was known to all Canaan Township as a man that got more work
out of his wife and children than any other farmer in the district.

"After school, some," Mr. Getz replied. "But not fur long at a time,
fur it gets late a'ready till she gets home. Anyhow, it's healthy fur
her workin' in the fields. I guess," he speculated, "it was her settin'
up in bed readin' last night done it. I don't know right how long it
went that she was readin' before I seen the light, but it was near
morning a'ready, and she'd burned near a whole candle out."

"And mebbe you punished her?" the doctor inquired, holding his hand to
Tillie's temples.

"Well," nodded Mr. Getz, "I guess she won't be doin' somepin like that
soon again. I think, still, I mebbe used the strap too hard, her bein'
a girl that way. But a body's got to learn 'em when they're young, you
know. And here it was a NOVEL-book! She borrowed the loan of it off of
Elviny Dinkleberger! I chucked it in the fire! I don't uphold to
novel-readin'!"

"Well, now," argued the doctor, settling back in his chair, crossing
his legs, and thrusting his thumbs into the arm-holes of his vest,
"some chance times I read in such a 'Home Companion' paper, and here
this winter I read a piece in nine chapters. I make no doubt that was a
novel. Leastways, I guess you'd call it a novel. And that piece," he
said impressively, "wouldn't hurt nobody! It learns you. That piece,"
he insisted, "was got up by a moral person."

"Then I guess it wasn't no novel, Doc," Mr. Getz firmly maintained.
"Anybody knows novels ain't moral. Anyhow, I ain't havin' none in my
house. If I see any, they get burnt up."

"It's a pity you burnt it up, Jake. I like to come by somepin like
that, still, to pass the time when there ain't much doin'. How did
Elviny Dinkleberger come by such a novel?"

"I don't know. If I see her pop, I 'll tell him he better put a stop to
such behaviors."

Tillie stirred restlessly on her pillow.

"What was the subjeck of that there novel, Tillie?" the doctor asked.

"Its subjeck was 'Iwanhoe,'" Mr. Getz answered. "Yes, I chucked it
right in the stove."

"'Iwanhoe'!" exclaimed the doctor. "Why, Elviny must of borrowed the
loan of that off of Teacher--I seen Teacher have it."

Tillie turned pleading eyes upon his face, but he did not see her.

"Do you mean to say," demanded Mr. Getz, "that Teacher lends NOVELS to
the scholars!"

"Och!" said the doctor, suddenly catching the frantic appeal of
Tillie's eyes, and answering it with ready invention, "what am I
talkin' about! It was Elviny lent it to Aunty Em's little Rebecca at
the HOtel, and Teacher was tellin' Rebecca she mustn't read it, but
give it back right aways to Elviny."

"Well!" said Mr. Getz, "a teacher that would lend novels to the
scholars wouldn't stay long at William Penn if MY wote could put her
out! And there 's them on the Board that thinks just like what I think!"

"To be sure!" the doctor soothed him. "TO be sure! Yes," he romanced,
"Rebecca she lent that book off of Elviny Dinkleberger, and Teacher she
tole Rebecca to give it back."

"I'll speak somepin to Elviny's pop, first time I see him, how Elviny's
lendin' a novel to the scholars!" affirmed Mr. Getz.

"You needn't trouble," said the doctor, coolly. "Elviny's pop he GIVE
Elviny that there book last Christmas. I don't know what he'll think,
Jake, at your burnin' it up."

Tillie was gazing at the doctor, now, half in bewilderment, half in
passionate gratitude.

"If Tillie did get smallpox," Mrs. Getz here broke in, "would she mebbe
have to be took to the pest-house?"

Tillie started, and her feverish eyes sought in the face of the doctor
to know what dreadful place a "pest-house" might be.

"Whether she'd have to be took to the pest-house?" the doctor
inquiringly repeated. "Yes, if she took the smallpox. But she ain't
takin' it. You needn't worry."

"Doctors don't know near as much now as what they used to, still," Mr.
Getz affirmed. "They didn't HAVE to have no such pest-houses when I was
a boy. Leastways, they didn't have 'em. And they didn't never ketch
such diseases like 'pendycitis and grip and them."

"Do you mean to say, Jake Getz, that you pass it as your opinion us
doctors don't know more now than what they used to know thirty years
ago, when you was a boy?"

"Of course they don't," was the dogmatic rejoinder. "Nor nobody knows
as much now as they did in ancient times a'ready. I mean back in Bible
times."

"Do you mean to say," hotly argued the doctor, "that they had
automobiles in them days?"

"To be sure I do! Automobiles and all the other lost sciences!"

"Well," said the doctor, restraining his scorn with a mighty effort,
"I'd like to see you prove it oncet!"

"I can prove it right out of the Bible! Do you want better proof than
that, Doc? The Bible says in so many words, 'There's nothing new under
the sun.' There! You can't come over that there, can you? You don't
consider into them things enough, Doc. You ain't a religious man, that
's the trouble!"

"I got religion a plenty, but I don't hold to no SICH dumm thoughts!"

"Did you get your religion at Bethel rewiwal?" Mrs. Getz quickly asked,
glancing up from the little stocking she was darning, to look with some
interest at the doctor. "I wanted to go over oncet before the rewiwal's
done. But now Tillie's sick, mebbe I won't get to go fur all. When they
have rewiwals at Bethel they always make so! And," she added, resuming
her darning, "I like to see 'em jump that way. My, but they jump, now,
when they get happy! But I didn't get to go this year yet."

"Well, and don't you get affected too?" the doctor asked, "and go out
to the mourners' bench?"

"If I do? No, I go just to see 'em jump," she monotonously repeated. "I
wasn't never conwerted. Mister he's a hard Evangelical, you know."

"And what does he think of your unconwerted state?" the doctor
jocularly inquired.

"What he thinks? There's nothing to think," was the stolid answer.

"Up there to Bethel rewiwal," said Mr. Getz, "they don't stay
conwerted. Till rewiwal's over, they're off church again."

"It made awful funny down there this two weeks back," repeated Mrs.
Getz. "They jumped so. Now there's the Lutherans, they don't make
nothin' when they conwert themselves. They don't jump nor nothin'. I
don't like their meetin's. It's onhandy Tillie got sick fur me just
now. I did want to go oncet. Here 's all this mendin' she could have
did, too. She 's handier at sewin' than what I am, still. I always had
so much other work, I never come at sewin', and I 'm some dopplig at
it."

"Yes?--yes," said the doctor, rising to go. "Well, Tillie, good-by, and
don't set up nights any more readin' novels," he laughed.

"She ain't likely to," said her father. "My childern don't generally do
somepin like that again after I once ketch 'em at it. Ain't so, Tillie?
Well, then, Doc, you think she ain't serious?"

"I said I can't tell till I've saw her again a'ready."

"How long will it go till you come again?"

"Well," the doctor considered, "it looks some fur fallin'
weather--ain't? If it rains and the roads are muddy till morning, so 's
I can't drive fast, I won't mebbe be here till ten o'clock."

"Oh, doctor," whispered Tillie, in a tone of distress, "can't I go to
school? Can't I? I'll be well enough, won't I? It's Friday to-morrow,
and I--I want to go!" she sobbed. "I want to go to Miss Margaret!"

"No, you can't go to school to-morrow, Tillie," her father said, "even
if you're some better; I'm keepin' you home to lay still one day
anyhow."

"But I don't want to stay home!" the child exclaimed, casting off the
shawl with which her father had covered her and throwing out her arms.
"I want to go to school! I want to, pop!" she sobbed, almost screaming.
"I want to go to Miss Margaret! I will, I will!"

"Tillie--Tillie!" her father soothed her in that unwonted tone of
gentleness that sounded so strange to her. His face had turned pale at
her outcries, delirious they seemed to him, coming from his usually
meek and submissive child. "There now," he said, drawing the cover over
her again; "now lay still and be a good girl, ain't you will?"

"Will you leave me go to school to-morrow?" she pleaded piteously.
"DARE I go to school to-morrow?"

"No, you dassent, Tillie. But if you're a good girl, mebbe I 'll leave
Sammy ast Teacher to come to see you after school."

"Oh, pop!" breathed the child ecstatically, as in supreme contentment
she sank back again on her pillow. "I wonder will she come? Do you
think she will come to see me, mebbe?"

"To be sure will she."

"Now think," said the doctor, "how much she sets store by Teacher! And
a lot of 'em's the same way--girls AND boys."

"I didn't know she was so much fur Teacher," said Mr. Getz. "She never
spoke nothin'."

"She never spoke nothin' to me about it neither," said Mrs. Getz.

"Well, I 'll give you all good-by, then," said the doctor; and he went
away.

On his slow journey home through the mud he mused on the inevitable
clash which he foresaw must some day come between the warm-hearted
teacher (whom little Tillie so loved, and who so injudiciously lent her
"novel-books") and the stern and influential school director, Jacob
Getz.

"There MY chanct comes in," thought the doctor; "there's where I mebbe
put in my jaw and pop the question--just when Jake Getz is makin' her
trouble and she's gettin' chased off her job. I passed my word I'd
stand by her, and, by gum, I 'll do it! When she's out of a job--that's
the time she 'll be dead easy! Ain't? She's the most allurin' female I
seen since my wife up't and died fur me!"




VI

JAKE GETZ IN A QUANDARY


Tillie's illness, though severe while it lasted, proved to be a matter
of only a few days' confinement to bed; and fortunately for her, it was
while she was still too weak and ill to be called to account for her
misdeed that her father discovered her deception as to the owner of
"Ivanhoe." At least he found out, in talking with Elviny Dinkleberger
and her father at the Lancaster market, that the girl was innocent of
ever having owned or even seen the book, and that, consequently, she
had of course never lent it either to Rebecca Wackernagel at the hotel
or to Tillie.

Despite his rigorous dealings with his family (which, being the outcome
of the Pennsylvania Dutch faith in the Divine right of the head of the
house, were entirely conscientious), Jacob Getz was strongly and deeply
attached to his wife and children; and his alarm at Tillie's illness,
coming directly upon his severe punishment of her, had softened him
sufficiently to temper his wrath at finding that she had told him what
was not true.

What her object could have been in shielding the real owner of the book
he could not guess. His suspicions did not turn upon the teacher,
because, in the first place, he would have seen no reason why Tillie
should wish to shield her, and, in the second, it was inconceivable
that a teacher at William Penn should set out so to pervert the young
whom trusting parents placed under her care. There never had been a
novel-reading teacher at William Penn. The Board would as soon have
elected an opium-eater.

WHERE HAD TILLIE OBTAINED THAT BOOK? And why had she put the blame on
Elviny, who was her little friend? The Doc, evidently, was in league
with Tillie! What could it mean? Jake Getz was not used to dealing with
complications and mysteries. He pondered the case heavily.

When he went home from market, he did not tell Tillie of his discovery,
for the doctor had ordered that she be kept quiet.

Not until a week later, when she was well enough to be out of bed, did
he venture to tell her he had caught her telling a falsehood.

He could not know that the white face of terror which she turned to him
was fear for Miss Margaret and not, for once, apprehension of the strap.

"I ain't whippin' you this time," he gruffly said, "if you tell me the
truth whose that there book was."

Tillie did not speak. She was resting in the wooden rocking-chair by
the kitchen window, a pillow at her head and a shawl over her knees.
Her stepmother was busy at the table with her Saturday baking; Sammy
was giving the porch its Saturday cleaning, and the other children, too
little to work, were playing outdoors; even the baby, bundled up in its
cart, was out on the grass-plot.

"Do you hear me, Tillie? Whose book was that there?"

Tillie's head hung low and her very lips were white. She did not answer.

"You 're goin' to act stubborn to ME!" her father incredulously
exclaimed, and the woman at the table turned and stared in dull
amazement at this unheard-of defiance of the head of the family.
"Tillie!" he grasped her roughly by the arm and shook her. "Answer to
me!"

Tillie's chest rose and fell tumultuously. Bat she kept her eyes
downcast and her lips closed.

"Fur why don't you want to tell, then?"

"I--can't, pop!"

"Can't! If you wasn't sick I 'd soon learn you if you can't! Now you
might as well tell me right aways, fur I'll make you tell me SOME time!"

Tillie's lips quivered and the tears rolled slowly over her white
cheeks.

"Fur why did you say it was Elviny?"

"She was the only person I thought to say."

"But fur why didn't you say the person it WAS? Answer to me!" he
commanded.

Tillie curved her arm over her face and sobbed. She was still too weak
from her fever to bear the strain of this unequal contest of wills.

"Well," concluded her father, his anger baffled and impotent before the
child's weakness, "I won't bother you with it no more NOW. But you just
wait till you 're well oncet! We'll see then if you'll tell me what I
ast you or no!"

"Here's the Doc," announced Mrs. Getz, as the sound of wheels was heard
outside the gate.

"Well," her husband said indignantly as he rose and went to the door,
"I just wonder what he's got to say fur hisself, lyin' to me like what
he done!"

"Hello, Jake!" was the doctor's breezy greeting as he walked into the
kitchen, followed by a brood of curious little Getzes, to whom the
doctor's daily visits were an exciting episode. "Howdy-do, missus," he
briskly addressed the mother of the brood, pushing his hat to the back
of his head in lieu of raising it. "And how's the patient?" he inquired
with a suddenly professional air and tone. "Some better, heh? HEH? Been
cryin'! What fur?" he demanded, turning to Mr. Getz. "Say, Jake, you
ain't been badgerin' this kid again fur somepin? She'll be havin' a
RElapse if you don't leave her be!"

"It's YOU I'm wantin' to badger, Doc Weaver!" retorted Mr. Getz. "What
fur did you lie to me about that there piece entitled 'Iwanhoe'?"

"You and your 'Iwanhoe' be blowed! Are you tormentin' this here kid
about THAT yet? A body'd think you'd want to change that subjec', Jake
Getz!"

"Not till I find from you, Doc, whose that there novel-book was, and
why you tole me it was Elviny Dinkleberger's!"

"That's easy tole," responded the doctor. "That there book belonged
to--"

"No, Doc, no, no!" came a pleading cry from Tillie. "Don't tell, Doc,
please don't tell!"

"Never you mind, Tillie, THAT'S all right. Look here, Jake Getz!" The
doctor turned his sharp little eyes upon the face of the father grown
dark with anger at his child's undutiful interference. "You're got this
here little girl worked up to the werge of a RElapse! I tole you she
must be kep' quiet and not worked up still!"

"All right. I'm leavin' HER alone--till she's well oncet! You just
answer fur YOURself and tell why you lied to me!"

"Well, Jake, it was this here way. That there book belonged to ME and
Tillie lent it off of me. That's how! Ain't Tillie?"

Mr. Getz stared in stupefied wonder, while Mrs. Getz, too, looked on
with a dull interest, as she leaned her back against the sink and dried
her hands upon her apron.

As for Tillie, a great throb of relief thrilled through her as she
heard the doctor utter this Napoleonic lie--only to be followed the
next instant by an overwhelming sense of her own wickedness in thus
conniving with fraud. Abysses of iniquity seemed to yawn at her feet,
and she gazed with horror into their black depths. How could she ever
again hold up her head.

But--Miss Margaret, at least, was safe from the School Board's wrath
and indignation, and how unimportant, compared with that, was her own
soul's salvation!

"Why didn't Tillie say it was yourn?" Mr. Getz presently found voice to
ask.

"I tole her if she left it get put out I am addicted to novel readin',"
said the doctor glibly, and with evident relish, "it might spoil my
practice some. And Tillie she's that kind-hearted she was sorry far me!"

"And so you put her up to say it was Elviny's! You put her up to tell
lies to her pop!"

"Well, I never thought you 'd foller it up any, Jake, and try to get
ELVINY into trouble."

"Doc, I always knowed you was a blasPHEmer and that you didn't have no
religion. But I thought you had anyhow morals. And I didn't think, now,
you was a coward that way, to get behind a child and lie out of your
own evil deeds!"

"I'm that much a coward and a blasPHEmer, Jake, that I 'm goin' to add
the cost of that there book of mine where you burnt up, to your
doctor's bill, unlest you pass me your promise you 'll drop this here
subjec' and not bother Tillie with it no more."

The doctor had driven his victim into a corner. To yield a point in
family discipline or to pay the price of the property he had
destroyed--one of the two he must do. It was a most untoward
predicament for Jacob Getz.

"You had no right to lend that there Book to Tillie, Doc, and I ain't
payin' you a cent fur it!" he maintained.

"I jus' mean, Jake, I 'll make out my bill easy or stiff accordin' to
the way you pass your promise."

"If my word was no more better 'n yours, Doe, my passin' my promise
wouldn't help much!"

"That's all right, Jake. I don't set up to be religious and moral. I
ain't sayed my prayers since I am old enough a'ready to know how likely
I was, still, to kneel on a tack!"

"It's no wonder you was put off of church!" was the biting retort.

"Hold up there, Jake. I wasn't put off. I WENT off. I took myself off
of church before the brethren had a chanct to PUT me off."

"Sammy!" Mr. Getz suddenly and sharply admonished his little son, who
was sharpening his slate-pencil on the window-sill with a table-knife,
"you stop right aways sharpenin' that pencil! You dassent sharpen your
slate-pencils, do you hear? It wastes 'em so!"

Sammy hastily laid down the knife and thrust the pencil into his pocket.

Mr. Getz turned again to the doctor and inquired irritably, "What is it
to YOU if I teach my own child to mind me or not, I'd like to know?"

"Because she's been bothered into a sickness with this here thing
a'ready, and it 's time it stopped now!"

"It was you started it, leavin' her lend the book off of you!"

"That's why I feel fur sparin' her some more trouble, seein' I was the
instrument in the hands of Providence fur gettin' her into all this
here mess. See?"

"I can't be sure when TO know if you're lyin' or not," said Mr. Getz
helplessly.

"Mebbe you can't, Jake. Sometimes I'm swangfid if I'm sure, still,
myself. But there's one thing you KIN be cocksure of--and that's a big
doctor-bill unlest you do what I sayed."

"Now that I know who she lent the book off of there ain't nothin' to
bother her about," sullenly granted Mr. Getz. "And as fur
punishment--she's had punishment a-plenty, I guess, in her bein' so
sick."

"All right," the doctor said magnanimously. "There's one thing I 'll
give you, Jake: you're a man of your word, if you ARE a Dutch hog!"

"A--WHATEVER?" Mr. Getz angrily demanded.

"And I don't see," the doctor complacently continued, rising and
pulling his hat down to his eyebrows, preparatory to leaving, "where
Tillie gets her fibbin' from. Certainly not from her pop."

"I don't mind her ever tellin' me no lie before."

"Och, Jake, you drive your children to lie to you, the way you bring
'em up to be afraid of you. They GOT to lie, now and again, to a feller
like you! Well, well," he soothingly added as he saw the black look in
the father's face at the airing of such views in the presence of his
children, "never mind, Jake, it 's all in the day's work!"

He turned for a parting glance at Tillie. "She 's better. She 'll be
well till a day or two, now, and back to school--IF she's kep' quiet,
and her mind ain't bothered any. Now, GOOD-by to yous."




VII

"THE LAST DAY OF PUMP-EYE"


For a long time after her unhappy experiences with "Ivanhoe" Tillie did
not again venture to transgress against her father's prohibition of
novels. But her fear of the family strap, although great, did not equal
the keenness of her mental hunger, and was not sufficient, therefore,
to put a permanent check upon her secret midnight reading, though it
did lead her to take every precaution against detection. Miss Margaret
continued to lend her books and magazines from time to time, and in
spite of the child's reluctance to risk involving the teacher in
trouble with the School Board through her father, she accepted them.
And so during all this winter, through her love for books and her
passionate devotion to her teacher, the little girl reveled in feasts
of fancy and emotion and this term at school was the first season of
real happiness her young life had ever known.

Once on her return from school the weight of a heavy volume had proved
too great a strain on her worn and thin undergarment during the long
walk home; the skirt had torn away from the band, and as she entered
the kitchen, her stepmother discovered the book. Tillie pleaded with
her not to tell her father, and perhaps she might have succeeded in
gaining a promise of secrecy had it not happened that just at the
critical moment her father walked into the kitchen.

Of course, then the book was handed over to him, and Tillie with it.

"Did you lend this off the Doc again?" her father sternly demanded, the
fated book in one hand and Tillie's shoulder grasped in the other.

Tillie hated to utter the lie. She hoped she had modified her
wickedness a bit by answering with a nod of her head.

"What's he mean, throwin' away so much money on books?" Mr. Getz took
time in his anger to wonder. He read the title, "'Last Days of
Pump-eye.' Well!" he exclaimed, "this here's the last HOUR of this here
'Pump-eye'! In the stove she goes! I don't owe the Doc no doctor's bill
NOW, and I'd like to see him make me pay him fur these here novels he
leaves you lend off of him!"

"Please, please, pop!" Tillie gasped, "don't burn it. Give it back
to--him! I won't read it--I won't bring home no more books of--hisn!
Only, please, pop, don't burn it--please!"

For answer, he drew her with him as he strode to the fireplace. "I'm
burnin' every book you bring home, do you hear?" he exclaimed; but
before he could make good his words, the kitchen door was suddenly
opened, and Sammy's head was poked in, with the announcement, "The
Doc's buggy's comin' up the road!" The door banged shut again, but
instantly Tillie wrenched her shoulder free from her father's hand,
flew out of doors and dashed across the "yard" to the front gate. Her
father's voice followed her, calling to her from the porch to "come
right aways back here!" Unheeding, she frantically waved to the doctor
in his approaching buggy. Sammy, with a bevy of small brothers and
sisters, to whom, no less than to their parents, the passing of a
"team" was an event not to be missed, were all crowded close to the
fence.

"Some one sick again?" inquired the doctor as he drew up at Tillie's
side.

"No, Doc--but," Tillie could hardly get her breath to speak, "pop's
goin' to burn up 'Last Days of Pompeii'; it's Miss Margaret's, and he
thinks it's yourn; come in and take it, Doc--PLEASE--and give it back
to Miss Margaret, won't you?"

"Sure!" The doctor was out of his buggy at her side in an instant.

"Oh!" breathed Tillie, "here's pop comin' with the book!"

"See me fix him!" chuckled the doctor. "He's so dumm he'll b'lee' most
anything. If I have much more dealin's with your pop, Tillie, I'll be
ketchin' on to how them novels is got up myself. And then mebbe I'll
LET doctorin', and go to novel-writin'!"

The doctor laughed with relish of his own joke, as Mr. Getz, grim with
anger, stalked up to the buggy.

"Look-ahere!" His voice was menacing as he held out the open book for
Tillie's inspection, and the child turned cold as she read on the
fly-leaf,

"Margaret Lind.

"From A. C. L.

Christmas, 18--"

"You sayed the Doc give it to you! Did you lend that other 'n' off of
Teacher too? Answer to me! I'll have her chased off of William Penn!
I'll bring it up at next Board meetin'!"

"Hold your whiskers, Jake, or they'll blow off! You're talkin' through
your hat! Don't be so dumm! Teacher she gev me that there book because
she passed me her opinion she don't stand by novel-readin'. She was
goin' to throw out that there book and I says I'd take it if she didn't
want it. So then I left Tillie borrow the loan of it."

"So that's how you come by it, is it?" Mr. Getz eyed the doctor with
suspicion. "How did you come by that there 'Iwanhoe'?"

"That there I bought at the second-hand book-store in there at
Lancaster one time. I ain't just so much fur books, but now and again I
like to buy one too, when I see 'em cheap."

"Well, here!" Mr. Getz tossed the book into tie buggy. "Take your old
'Pump-eye.' And clear out. If I can't make you stop tryin' to spoil my
child fur me, I can anyways learn her what she'll get oncet, if she
don't mind!"

Again his hand grasped Tillie's shoulder as he turned her about to take
her into the house.

"You better watch out, Jake Getz, or you 'll have another doctor's bill
to pay!" the doctor warningly called after him. "That girl of yourn
ain't strong enough to stand your rough handlin', and you'll find it
out some day--to your regret! You'd better go round back and let off
your feelin's choppin' wood fur missus, stead of hittin' that little
girl, you big dopple!"

Mr. Getz stalked on without deigning to reply, thrusting Tillie ahead
of him. The doctor jumped into his buggy and drove off.

His warning, however, was not wholly lost upon the father. Tillie's
recent illness had awakened remorse for the severe punishment he had
given her on the eve of it; and it had also touched his purse; and so,
though she did not escape punishment for this second and, therefore,
aggravated offense, it was meted out in stinted measure. And indeed, in
her relief and thankfulness at again saving Miss Margaret, the child
scarcely felt the few light blows which, in order that parental
authority be maintained, her father forced himself to inflict upon her.

In spite of these mishaps, however, Tillie continued to devour all the
books she could lay hold of and to run perilous risks for the sake of
the delight she found in them.

Miss Margaret stood to her for an image of every heroine of whom she
read in prose or verse, and for the realization of all the romantic
day-dreams in which, as an escape from the joyless and sordid life of
her home, she was learning to live and move and have her being.

Therefore it came to her as a heavy blow indeed when, just after the
Christmas holidays, her father announced to her on the first morning of
the reopening of school, "You best make good use of your time from now
on, Tillie, fur next spring I'm takin' you out of school."

Tillie's face turned white, and her heart thumped in her breast so that
she could not speak.

"You're comin' twelve year old," her father continued, "and you're
enough educated, now, to do you. Me and mom needs you at home."

It never occurred to Tillie to question or discuss a decision of her
father's. When he spoke it was a finality and one might as well rebel
at the falling of the snow or rain. Tillie's woe was utterly hopeless.

Her dreary, drooping aspect in the next few days was noticed by Miss
Margaret.

"Pop's takin' me out of school next spring," she heart-brokenly said
when questioned. "And when I can't see you every day, Miss Margaret, I
won't feel for nothin' no more. And I thought to get more educated than
what I am yet. I thought to go to school till I was anyways fourteen."

So keenly did Miss Margaret feel the outrage and wrong of Tillie's
arrested education, when her father could well afford to keep her in
school until she was grown, if he would; so stirred was her warm
Southern blood at the thought of the fate to which poor Tillie seemed
doomed--the fate of a household drudge with not a moment's leisure from
sunrise to night for a thought above the grubbing existence of a
domestic beast of burden (thus it all looked to this woman from
Kentucky), that she determined, cost what it might, to go herself to
appeal to Mr. Getz.

"He will have me 'chased off of William Penn,'" she ruefully told
herself. "And the loss just now of my munificent salary of thirty-five
dollars a month would be inconvenient. 'The Doc' said he would 'stand
by' me. But that might be more inconvenient still!" she thought, with a
little shudder. "I suppose this is an impolitic step for me to take.
But policy 'be blowed,' as the doctor would say! What are we in this
world for but to help one another? I MUST try to help little
Tillie--bless her!"

So the following Monday afternoon after school, found Miss Margaret, in
a not very complacent or confident frame of mind, walking with Tillie
and her younger brother and sister out over the snow-covered road to
the Getz farm to face the redoubtable head of the family.




VIII

MISS MARGARET'S ERRAND


It was half-past four o'clock when they reached the farm-house, and
they found the weary, dreary mother of the family cleaning fish at the
kitchen sink, one baby pulling at her skirts, another sprawling on the
floor at her feet.

Miss Margaret inquired whether she might see Mr. Getz.

"If you kin? Yes, I guess," Mrs. Getz dully responded. "Sammy, you go
to the barn and tell pop Teacher's here and wants to speak somepin to
him. Mister's out back," she explained to Miss Margaret, "choppin'
wood."

Sammy departed, and Miss Margaret sat down in the chair which Tillie
brought to her. Mrs. Getz went on with her work at the sink, while
Tillie set to work at once on a crock of potatoes waiting to be pared.

"You are getting supper very early, aren't you?' Miss Margaret asked,
with a friendly attempt to make conversation.

"No, we're some late. And I don't get it ready yet, I just start it.
We're getting strangers fur supper."

"Are you?"

"Yes. Some of Mister's folks from East Bethel."

"And are they strangers to you?"

Mrs. Getz paused in her scraping of the fish to consider the question.

"If they're strangers to us? Och, no. We knowed them this long time
a'ready. Us we're well acquainted. But to be sure they don't live with
us, so we say strangers is comin'. You don't talk like us; ain't?"

"N--not exactly."

"I do think now (you must excuse me sayin' so) but you do talk awful
funny," Mrs. Getz smiled feebly.

"I suppose I do," Miss Margaret sympathetically replied.

Mr. Getz now came into the room, and Miss Margaret rose to greet him.

"I'm much obliged to meet you," he said awkwardly as he shook hands
with her.

He glanced at the clock on the mantel, then turned to speak to Tillie.

"Are yous home long a'ready?" he inquired.

"Not so very long," Tillie answered with an apprehensive glance at the
clock.

"You're some late," he said, with a threatening little nod as he drew
up a chair in front of the teacher.

"It's my fault," Miss Margaret hastened to say, "I made the children
wait to bring me out here."

"Well," conceded Mr. Getz, "then we'll leave it go this time."

Miss Margaret now bent her mind to the difficult task of persuading
this stubborn Pennsylvania Dutchman to accept her views as to what was
for the highest and best good of his daughter. Eloquently she pointed
out to him that Tillie being a child of unusual ability, it would be
much better for her to have an education than to be forced to spend her
days in farm-house drudgery.

But her point of view, being entirely novel, did not at all appeal to
him.

"I never thought to leave her go to school after she was twelve. That's
long enough fur a girl; a female don't need much book-knowledge. It
don't help her none to keep house fur her mister."

"But she could become a teacher and then she could earn money," Miss
Margaret argued, knowing the force of this point with Mr. Getz.

"But look at all them years she'd have to spend learnin' herself to be
intelligent enough fur to be a teacher, when she might be helpin' me
and mom."

"But she could help you by paying board here when she becomes the New
Canaan teacher."

"That's so too," granted Mr. Getz; and Margaret grew faintly hopeful.

"But," he added, after a moment's heavy weighing of the matter, "it
would take too long to get her enough educated fur to be a teacher, and
I'm one of them," he maintained, "that holds a child is born to help
the parent, and not contrarywise--that the parent must do everything
fur the child that way."

"If you love your children, you must wish for their highest good," she
suggested, "and not trample on their best interests."

"But they have the right to work for their parents," he insisted. "You
needn't plague me to leave Tillie stay in school, Teacher. I ain't
leavin' her!"

"Do you think you have a right to bring children into the world only to
crush everything in them that is worth while?" Margaret dared to say to
him, her face flushed, her eyes bright with the intensity of her
feelings.

"That's all blamed foolishness!" Jake Getz affirmed.

"Do you think that your daughter, when she is grown and realizes all
that she has lost, will 'rise up and call you blessed'?" she persisted.

"Do I think? Well, what I think is that it's a good bit more particular
that till she's growed she's been learnt to work and serve them that
raised her. And what I think is that a person ain't fit to be a teacher
of the young that sides along with the childern ag'in' their parents."

Miss Margaret felt that it was time she took her leave.

"Look-ahere oncet, Teacher!" Mr. Getz suddenly said, fixing on her a
suspicious and searching look, "do you uphold to novel-readin'?"

Miss Margaret hesitated perceptibly. She must shield Tillie even more
than herself. "What a question to ask of the teacher at William Penn!"
she gravely answered.

"I know it ain't such a wery polite question," returned Mr. Getz, half
apologetically. "But the way you side along with childern ag'in' their
parents suspicions me that the Doc was lyin' when he sayed them
novel-books was hisn. Now was they hisn or was they yourn?"

Miss Margaret rose with a look and air of injury. "'Mr. Getz, no one
ever before asked me such questions. Indeed," she said, in a tone of
virtuous primness, "I can't answer such questions."

"All the same," sullenly asserted Mr. Getz, "I wouldn't put it a-past
you after the way you passed your opinion to me this after!"

"I must be going," returned Miss Margaret with dignity.

Mrs. Getz came forward from the stove with a look and manner of apology
for her husband's rudeness to the visitor.

"What's your hurry? Can't you stay and eat along? We're not anyways
tired of you."

"Thank you. But they will be waiting for me at the hotel," said Miss
Margaret gently.

Tillie, a bit frightened, also hovered near, her wistful little face
pale. Miss Margaret drew her to her and held her at her side, as she
looked up into the face of Mr. Getz.

"I am very, very sorry, Mr. Getz, that my visit has proved so
fruitless. You don't realize what a mistake you are making."

"That ain't the way a teacher had ought to talk before a scholar to its
parent!" indignantly retorted Mr. Getz. "And I'm pretty near sure it
was all the time YOU where lent them Books to Tillie--corruptin' the
young! I can tell you right now, I ain't votin' fur you at next
election! And the way I wote is the way two other members always wotes
still--and so you'll lose your job at William Penn! That's what you get
fur tryin' to interfere between a parent and a scholar! I hope it'll
learn you!"

"And when is the next election?" imperturbably asked Miss Margaret.

"Next month on the twenty-fifth of February. Then you'll see oncet!"

"According to the terms of my agreement with the Board I hold my
position until the first of April unless the Board can show reasons why
it should be taken from me. What reasons can you show?"

"That you side along with the--"

"That I try to persuade you not to take your child out of school when
you can well afford to keep her there. That's what you have to tell the
Board."

Mr. Getz stared at her, rather baffled. The children also stared in
wide-eyed curiosity, realizing with wonder that Teacher was "talkin' up
to pop!" It was a novel and interesting spectacle.

"Well, anyways," continued Mr. Getz, rallying, "I'll bring it up in
Board meeting that you mebbe leave the scholars borry the loan of
novels off of you."

"But you can't prove it. I shall hold the Board to their contract. They
can't break it."

Miss Margaret was taking very high ground, of which, in fact, she was
not at all sure.

Mr. Getz gazed at her with mingled anger and fascination. Here was
certainly a new species of woman! Never before had any teacher at
William Penn failed to cringe to his authority as a director.

"This much I KIN say," he finally declared. "Mebbe you kin hold us to
that there contract, but you won't, anyways, be elected to come back
here next term! That's sure! You'll have to look out fur another place
till September a'ready. And we won't give you no recommend, neither, to
get yourself another school with!"

Just here it was that Miss Margaret had her triumph, which she was
quite human enough to thoroughly enjoy.

"You won't have a chance to reelect me, for I am going to resign at the
end of the term. I am going to be married the week after school closes."

Never had Mr. Getz felt himself so foiled. Never before had any one
subject in any degree to his authority so neatly eluded a reckoning at
his hands. A tingling sensation ran along his arm and he had to
restrain his impulse to lift it, grasp this slender creature standing
so fearlessly before him, and thoroughly shake her.

"Who's the party?" asked Mrs. Getz, curiously. "It never got put out
that you was promised. I ain't heard you had any steady comp'ny. To be
sure, some says the Doc likes you pretty good. Is it now, mebbe, the
Doc? But no," she shook her head; "Mister's sister Em at the hotel
would have tole me. Is it some one where lives around here?"

"I don't mind telling you," Miss Margaret graciously answered,
realizing that her reply would greatly increase Mr. Getz's sense of
defeat. "It is Mr. Lansing, a nephew of the State Superintendent of
schools and a professor at the Millersville Normal School."

"Well, now just look!" Mrs. Getz exclaimed wonderingly. "Such a tony
party! The State Superintendent's nephew! That's even a more way-up
person than what the county superintendent is! Ain't? Well, who'd 'a'
thought!"

"Miss Margaret!" Tillie breathed, gazing up at her, her eyes wide and
strained with distress, "if you go away and get married, won't I NEVER
see you no more?"

"But, dear, I shall live so near--at the Normal School only a few miles
away. You can come to see me often."

"But pop won't leave me, Miss Margaret--it costs too expensive to go
wisiting, and I got to help with the work, still. O Miss Margaret!"
Tillie sobbed, as Margaret sat down and held the clinging child to her,
"I'll never see you no more after you go away!"

"Tillie, dear!" Margaret tried to soothe her. "I 'll come to see YOU,
then, if you can't come to see me. Listen, Tillie,--I've just thought
of something."

Suddenly she put the little girl from her and stood up.

"Let me take Tillie to live with me next fall at the Normal School.
Won't you do that, Mr. Getz!" she urged him. "She could go to the
preparatory school, and if we stay at Millersville, Dr. Lansing and I
would try to have her go through the Normal School and graduate. Will
you consent to it, Mr. Getz?"

"And who'd be payin' fur all this here?" Mr. Getz ironically inquired.

"Tillie could earn her own way as my little maid--helping me keep my
few rooms in the Normal School building and doing my mending and
darning for me. And you know after she was graduated she could earn her
living as a teacher."

Margaret saw the look of feverish eagerness with which Tillie heard
this proposal and awaited the outcome.

Before her husband could answer, Mrs. Getz offered a weak protest.

"I hear the girls hired in town have to set away back in the kitchen
and never dare set front--always away back, still. Tillie wouldn't like
that. Nobody would."

"But I shall live in a small suite of rooms at the school--a library, a
bedroom, a bath-room, and a small room next to mine that can be
Tillie's bedroom. We shall take our meals in the school dining-room."

"Well, that mebbe she wouldn't mind. But 'way back she wouldn't be
satisfied to set. That's why the country girls don't like to hire in
town, because they dassent set front with the missus. Here last
market-day Sophy Haberbush she conceited she'd like oncet to hire out
in town, and she ast me would I go with her after market to see a lady
that advertised in the newspaper fur a girl, and I sayed no, I wouldn't
mind. So I went along. But Sophy she wouldn't take the place fur all.
She ast the lady could she have her country company, Sundays--he was
her company fur four years now and she wouldn't like to give him up
neither. She tole the lady her company goes, still, as early as eleven.
But the lady sayed her house must be darkened and locked at half-past
ten a'ready. She ast me was I Sophy's mother and I sayed no, I'm
nothin' to her but a neighbor woman. And she tole Sophy, when they eat,
still, Sophy she couldn't eat along. I guess she thought Sophy
Haberbush wasn't good enough. But she's as good as any person. Her
mother's name is Smith before she was married, and them Smiths was well
fixed. She sayed Sophy'd have to go in and out the back way and never
out the front. Why, they say some of the town people's that proud, if
the front door-bell rings and the missus is standin' right there by it,
she won't open that there front door but wants her hired girl to come
clear from the kitchen to open it. Yes, you mightn't b'lee me, but I
heerd that a'ready. And Mary Hertzog she tole me when she hired out
there fur a while one winter in town, why, one day she went to the
missus and she says, 'There's two ladies in the parlor and I tole 'em
you was helpin' in the kitchen,' and the missus she ast her, 'What fur
did you tell 'em that? Why, I'm that ashamed I don't know how to walk
in the parlor!' And Mary she ast the colored gentleman that worked
there, what, now, did the missus mean?--and he sayed, 'Well, Mary,
you've a heap to learn about the laws of society. Don't you know you
must always leave on the ladies ain't doin' nothin'?' Mary sayed that
colored gentleman was so wonderful intelligent that way. He'd been a
restaurant waiter there fur a while and so was throwed in with the best
people, and he was, now, that tony and high-minded! Och, I wouldn't
hire in town! To be sure, Mister can do what he wants. Well," she
added, "it's a quarter till five--I guess I'll put the peppermint on a
while. Mister's folks'll be here till five."

She moved away to the stove, and Margaret resumed her assault upon the
stubborn ignorance of the father.

"Think, Mr. Getz, what a difference all this would make in Tillie's
life," she urged.

"And you'd be learnin' her all them years to up and sass her pop when
she was growed and earnin' her own livin'!" he objected.

"I certainly would not."

"And all them years till she graduated she'd be no use to us where owns
her," he said, as though his child were an item of live stock on the
farm.

"She could come home to you in the summer vacations," Margaret
suggested.

"Yes, and she'd come that spoilt we couldn't get no work out of her.
No, if I hire her out winters, it'll be where I kin draw her wages
myself--where's my right as her parent. What does a body have childern
fur? To get no use out of 'em? It ain't no good you're plaguin' me. I
ain't leavin' her go. Tillie!" he commanded the child with a twirl of
his thumb and a motion of his head; "go set the supper-table!"

Margaret laid her arm about Tillie's shoulder. "Well, dear," she said
sorrowfully, "we must give it all up, I suppose. But don't lose heart,
Tillie. I shall not go out of your life. At least we can write to each
other. Now," she concluded, bending and kissing her, "I must go, but
you and I shall have some talks before you stop school, and before I go
away from New Canaan."

She pressed her lips to Tillie's in a long kiss, while the child clung
to her in passionate devotion. Mr. Getz looked on with dull
bewilderment. He knew, in a vague way, that every word the teacher
spoke to the child, no less than those useless caresses, was "siding
along with the scholar ag'in' the parent," and yet he could not
definitely have stated just how. He was quite sure that she would not
dare so to defy him did she not know that she had the whip-handle in
the fact that she did not want her "job" next year, and that the Board
could not, except for definite offenses, break their contract with her.
It was only in view of these considerations that she played her game of
"plaguing" him by championing Tillie. Jacob Getz was incapable of
recognizing in the teacher's attitude toward his child an unselfish
interest and love.

So, in dogged, sullen silence, he saw this extraordinary young woman
take her leave and pass out of his house.




IX

"I'LL DO MY DARN BEST, TEACHER!"


It soon "got put out" in New Canaan that Miss Margaret was "promised,"
and the doctor was surprised to find how much the news depressed him.

"I didn't know, now, how much I was stuck on her! To think I can't have
her even if I do want her" (up to this time he had had moments now and
then of not feeling absolutely sure of his inclination), "and that
she's promised to one of them tony Millersville Normal professors! If
it don't beat all! Well," he drew a long, deep sigh as, lounging back
in his buggy, he let his horse jog at his own gait along the muddy
country road, "I jus' don't feel fur NOTHIN' to-day. She was now
certainly a sweet lady," he thought pensively, as though alluding to
one who had died. "If there's one sek I do now like, it's the
female--and she was certainly a nice party!"

In the course of her career at William Penn, Miss Margaret had
developed such a genuine fondness for the shaggy, good-natured,
generous, and unscrupulous little doctor, that before she abandoned her
post at the end of the term, and shook the dust of New Canaan from her
feet, she took him into her confidence and begged him to take care of
Tillie.

"She is an uncommon child, doctor, and she must--I am determined that
she must--be rescued from the life to which that father of hers would
condemn her. You must help me to bring it about."

"Nothin' I like better, Teacher, than gettin' ahead of Jake Getz," the
doctor readily agreed. "Or obligin' YOU. To tell you the truth,--and it
don't do no harm to say it now,--if you hadn't been promised, I was
a-goin' to ast you myself! You took notice I gave you an inwitation
there last week to go buggy-ridin' with me. That was leadin' up to it.
After that Sunday night you left me set up with you, I never conceited
you was promised a'ready to somebody else--and you even left me set
with my feet on your chair-rounds!" The doctor's tone was a bit injured.

"Am I to understand," inquired Miss Margaret, wonderingly, "that the
permission to sit with one's feet on the rounds of a lady's chair is
taken in New Canaan as an indication of her favor--and even of her
inclination to matrimony?"

"It's looked to as meanin' gettin' down to BIZ!" the doctor affirmed.

"Then," meekly, "I humbly apologize."

"That's all right," generously granted the doctor, "if you didn't know
no better. But to be sure, I'm some disappointed."

"I'm sorry for that!"

"Would you of mebbe said yes, if you hadn't of been promised a'ready to
one of them tony Millersville Normal professors," the doctor inquired
curiously--"me bein' a professional gentleman that way?"

"I'm sure," replied this daughter of Eve, who wished to use the doctor
in her plans for Tillie, "I should have been highly honored."

The rueful, injured look on the doctor's face cleared to flattered
complacency. "Well," he said, "I'd like wery well to do what you ast
off of me fur little Tillie Getz. But, Teacher, what can a body do
against a feller like Jake Getz? A body can't come between a man and
his own offspring."

"I know it," replied Margaret, sadly. "But just keep a little watch
over Tillie and help her whenever you see that you can. Won't you?
Promise me that you will. You have several times helped her out of
trouble this winter. There may be other similar opportunities. Between
us, doctor, we may be able to make something of Tillie."

The doctor shook his head. "I'll do my darn best, Teacher, but Jake
Getz he's that wonderful set. A little girl like Tillie couldn't never
make no headway with Jake Getz standin' in her road. But anyways,
Teacher, I pass you my promise I'll do what I can."

Miss Margaret's parting advice and promises to Tillie so fired the
girl's ambition and determination that some of the sting and anguish of
parting from her who stood to the child for all the mother-love that
her life had missed, was taken away in the burning purpose with which
she found herself imbued, to bend her every thought and act in all the
years to come to the reaching of that glorious goal which her idolized
teacher set before her.

"As soon as you are old enough," Miss Margaret admonished her, "you
must assert yourself. Take your rights--your right to an education, to
some girlish pleasures, to a little liberty. No matter what you have to
suffer in the struggle, FIGHT IT OUT, for you will suffer more in the
end if you let yourself be defrauded of everything which makes it worth
while to have been born. Don't let yourself be sacrificed for those who
not only will never appreciate it, but who will never be worth it. I
think I do you no harm by telling you that you are worth all the rest
of your family put together. The self-sacrifice which pampers the
selfishness of others is NOT creditable. It is weak. It is unworthy.
Remember what I say to you--make a fight for your rights, just as soon
as you are old enough--your right to be a woman instead of a chattel
and a drudge. And meantime, make up for your rebellion by being as
obedient and helpful and affectionate to your parents as you can be,
without destroying yourself."

Such sentiments and ideas were almost a foreign language to Tillie, and
yet, intuitively, she understood the import of them. In her loneliness,
after Miss Margaret's departure, she treasured and brooded over them
day and night; and very much as the primitive Christian courted
martyrdom, her mind dwelt, with ever-growing resolution, upon the
thought of the heroic courage with which, in the years to come, she
would surely obey them.

Miss Margaret had promised Tillie that she would write to her, and the
child, overlooking the serious difficulties in the way, had eagerly
promised in return, to answer her letters.

Once a week Mr. Getz called for mail at the village store, and Miss
Margaret's first letter was laboriously read by him on his way out to
the farm.

He found it, on the whole, uninteresting, but he vaguely gathered from
one or two sentences that the teacher, even at the distance of five
miles, was still trying to "plague" him by "siding along with his child
ag'in' her parent."

"See here oncet," he said to Tillie, striding to the kitchen stove on
his return home, the letter in his hand: "this here goes after them
novel-books, in the fire! I ain't leavin' that there woman spoil you
with no such letters like this here. Now you know!"

The gleam of actual wickedness in Tillie's usually soft eyes, as she
saw that longed-for letter tossed into the flames, would have startled
her father had he seen it. The girl trembled from head to foot and
turned a deathly white.

"I hate you, hate you, hate you!" her hot heart was saying as she
literally glared at her tormentor. "I'll never forget this--never,
never; I'll make you suffer for it--I will, I will!"

But her white lips were dumb, and her impotent passion, having no other
outlet, could only tear and bruise her own heart as all the long
morning she worked in a blind fury at her household tasks.

But after dinner she did an unheard-of thing. Without asking
permission, or giving any explanation to either her father or her
stepmother, she deliberately abandoned her usual Saturday afternoon
work of cleaning up (she said to herself that she did not care if the
house rotted), and dressing herself, she walked straight through the
kitchen before her stepmother's very eyes, and out of the house.

Her father was out in the fields when she undertook this high-handed
step; and her mother was so dumb with amazement at such unusual
behavior that she offered but a weak protest.

"What'll pop say to your doin' somepin like this here!" she called
querulously after Tillie as she followed her across the kitchen to the
door. "He'll whip you, Tillie; and here's all the sweepin' to be did--"

There was a strange gleam in Tillie's eyes before which the woman
shrank and held her peace. The girl swept past her, almost walked over
several of the children sprawling on the porch, and went out of the
gate and up the road toward the village.

"What's the matter of her anyways?" the woman wonderingly said to
herself as she went back to her work. "Is it that she's so spited about
that letter pop burnt up? But what's a letter to get spited about?
There was enough worse things'n that that she took off her pop without
actin' like this. Och, but he'll whip her if he gets in here before she
comes back. Where's she goin' to, I wonder! Well, I never did! I would
not be HER if her pop finds how she went off and let her work! I wonder
shall I mebbe tell him on her or not, if he don't get in till she's
home a'ready?"

She meditated upon this problem of domestic economy as she mechanically
did her chores, her reflections on Tillie taking an unfriendly color as
she felt the weight of her stepdaughter's abandoned tasks added to the
already heavy burden of her own.

It was to see the doctor that Tillie had set out for the village hotel.
He was the only person in all her little world to whom she felt she
could turn for help in her suffering. Her "Aunty Em," the landlady at
the hotel, was, she knew, very fond of her; but Tillie never thought of
appealing to her in her trouble.

"I never thought when I promised Miss Margaret I'd write to her still
where I'd get the stamps from, and the paper and envelops," Tillie
explained to the doctor as they sat in confidential consultation in the
hotel parlor, the child's white face of distress a challenge to his
faithful remembrance of his promise to the teacher. "And now I got to
find some way to let her know I didn't see her letter to me. Doc, will
you write and tell her for me?" she pleaded.

"My hand-writin' ain't just so plain that way, Tillie. But I'll give
you all the paper and envelops and stamps you want to write on yourself
to her."

"Oh, Doc!" Tillie gazed at him in fervent gratitude. "But mebbe I
hadn't ought to take 'em when I can't pay you."

"That's all right. If it'll make you feel some easier, you kin pay me
when you're growed up and teachin'. Your Miss Margaret she's bound to
make a teacher out of you--or anyways a educated person. And then you
kin pay me when you're got your nice education to make your livin'
with."

"That's what we'll do then!" Tillie joyfully accepted this proposal.
"I'll keep account and pay you back every cent, Doc, when I'm earnin'
my own livin'."

"All right. That's settled then. Now, fur your gettin' your letters,
still, from Teacher. How are we goin' to work that there? I'll tell
you, Tillie!" he slapped the table as an idea came to him. "You write
her off a letter and tell her she must write her letters to you in a
envelop directed to ME. And I'll see as you get 'em all right, you bet!
Ain't?"

"Oh, Doc!" Tillie was affectionately grateful. "You are so kind to me!
What would I do without you?" Tears choked her voice, filled her eyes,
and rolled down her face.

"Och, that's all right," he patted her shoulder. "Ain't no better fun
goin' fur me than gettin' ahead of that mean old Jake Getz!" Tillie
drew back a bit shocked; but she did not protest.

Carrying in her bosom a stamped envelop, a sheet of paper and a pencil,
the child walked home in a very different frame of mind from that in
which she had started out. She shuddered as she remembered how wickedly
rebellious had been her mood that morning. Never before had such hot
and dreadful feelings and thoughts burned in her heart and brain. In an
undefined way, the growing girl realized that such a state of mind and
heart was unworthy her sacred friendship with Miss Margaret.

"I want to be like her--and she was never ugly in her feelings like
what I was all morning!"

When she reached home, she so effectually made up for lost time in the
vigor with which she attacked the Saturday cleaning that Mrs. Getz,
with unusual forbearance, decided not to tell her father of her
insubordination.

Tillie wrote her first letter to Miss Margaret, ty stealth, at midnight.




X

ADAM SCHUNK'S FUNERAL


A crucial struggle with her father, to which both Tillie and Miss
Margaret had fearfully looked forward, came about much sooner than
Tillie had anticipated. The occasion of it, too, was not at all what
she had expected and even planned it to be.

It was her conversion, just a year after she had been taken out of
school, to the ascetic faith of the New Mennonites that precipitated
the crisis, this conversion being wrought by a sermon which she heard
at the funeral of a neighboring farmer.

A funeral among the farmers of Lancaster County is a festive occasion,
the most popular form of dissipation known, bringing the whole
population forth as in some regions they turn out to a circus.

Adam Schank's death, having been caused by his own hand in a fit of
despair over the loss of some money he had unsuccessfully invested, was
so sudden and shocking that the effect produced on Canaan Township was
profound, not to say awful.

As for Tillie, it was the first event of the kind that had ever come
within her experience, and the religious sentiments in which she had
been reared aroused in her, in common with the rest of the community, a
superstitious fear before this sudden and solemn calling to judgment of
one whom they had all known so familiarly, and who had so wickedly
taken his own life.

During the funeral at the farm-house, she sat in the crowded parlor
where the coffin stood, and though surrounded by people, she felt
strangely alone with this weird mystery of Death which for the first
time she was realizing.

Her mother was in the kitchen with the other farmers' wives of the
neighborhood who were helping to prepare the immense quantity of food
necessary to feed the large crowd that always attended a funeral, every
one of whom, by the etiquette of the county, remained to supper after
the services.

Her father, being among the hired hostlers of the occasion, was outside
in the barn. Mr. Getz was head hostler at every funeral of the
district, being detailed to assist and superintend the work of the
other half dozen men employed to take charge of the "teams" that
belonged to the funeral guests, who came in families, companies, and
crowds. That so well-to-do a farmer as Jake Getz, one who owned his
farm "clear," should make a practice of hiring out as a funeral
hostler, with the humbler farmers who only rented the land they tilled,
was one of the facts which gave him his reputation for being "keen on
the penny."

Adam Schunk, deceased, had been an "Evangelical," but his wife being a
New Mennonite, a sect largely prevailing in southeastern Pennsylvania,
the funeral services were conducted by two ministers, one of them a New
Mennonite and the other an Evangelical. It was the sermon of the New
Mennonite that led to Tillie's conversion.

The New Mennonites being the most puritanic and exclusive of all sects,
earnestly regarding themselves as the custodians of the only absolutely
true light, their ministers insist on certain prerogatives as the
condition of giving their services at a funeral. A New Mennonite
preacher will not consent to preach after a "World's preacher"--he must
have first voice. It was therefore the somber doctrine of fear preached
by the Reverend Brother Abram Underwocht which did its work upon
Tillie's conscience so completely that the gentler Gospel set forth
afterward by the Evangelical brother was scarcely heeded.

The Reverend Brother Abram Underwocht, in the "plain" garb of the
Mennonite sect, took his place at the foot of the stairway opening out
of the sitting-room, and gave expression to his own profound sense of
the solemnity of the occasion by a question introductory to his sermon,
and asked in a tone of heavy import: "If this ain't a blow, what is it?"

Handkerchiefs were promptly produced and agitated faces hidden therein.

Why this was a "blow" of more than usual force, Brother Underwocht
proceeded to explain in a blood-curdling talk of more than an hour's
length, in which he set forth the New Mennonite doctrine that none
outside of the only true faith of Christ, as held and taught by the New
Mennonites, could be saved from the fire which cannot be quenched. With
the heroism born of deep conviction, he stoically disregarded the
feelings of the bereaved family, and affirmed that the deceased having
belonged to one of "the World's churches," no hope could be entertained
for him, nor could his grieving widow look forward to meeting him again
in the heavenly home to which she, a saved New Mennonite, was destined.

Taking advantage of the fact that at least one third of those present
were non-Mennonites, Brother Underwoeht followed the usual course of
the preachers of his sect on such an occasion, and made of his funeral
sermon an exposition of the whole field of New Mennonite faith and
practice. Beginning in the Garden of Eden, he graphically described
that renowned locality as a type of the Paradise from which Adam Schunk
and others who did not "give themselves up" were excluded.

"It must have been a magnificent scenery to Almighty Gawd," he said,
referring to the beauties of man's first Paradise. "But how soon to be
snatched by sin from man's mortal vision, when Eve started that
conversation with the enemy of her soul! Beloved, that was an
unfortunate circumstance! And you that are still out of Christ and in
the world, have need to pray fur Gawd's help, his aid, and his
assistance, to enable you to overcome the enemy who that day was turned
loose upon the world--that Gawd may see fit to have you when you're
done here a'ready. Heed the solemn warning of this poor soul now laying
before you cold in death!

    "'Know that you're a transient creature,
    Soon to fade and pass away."

"Even Lazarus, where [who] was raised to life, was not raised fur never
to die no more!"

The only comfort he could offer to this stricken household was that HE
knew how bad they felt, having had a brother who had died with equal
suddenness and also without hope, as he "had suosode hisself with a
gun."

This lengthy sermon was followed by a hymn, sung a line at a time at
the preacher's dictation:

    "The body we now to the grave will commit,
    To there see corruption till Jesus sees fit
    A spirit'al body for it to prepare,
    Which henceforth then shall immortality wear."

The New Mennonites being forbidden by the "Rules of the Meeting" ever
to hear a prayer or sermon by one who is not "a member," it was
necessary, at the end of the Reverend Abram Underwocht's sermon, for
all the Mennonites present to retire to a room apart and sit behind
closed doors, while the Evangelical brother put forth his false
doctrine.

So religiously stirred was Tillie by the occasion that she was strongly
tempted to rise and follow into the kitchen those who were thus
retiring from the sound of the false teacher's voice. But her
conversion not yet being complete, she kept her place.

No doubt it was not so much the character of Brother Underwocht's New
Mennonite sermon which effected this state in Tillie as that the
spiritual condition of the young girl, just awakening to her womanhood,
with all its mysterious craving, its religious brooding, its emotional
susceptibility, led her to respond with her whole soul to the first
appeal to her feelings.

Absorbed in her mournful contemplation of her own deep "conviction of
sin," she did not heed the singing, led by the Evangelical brother, of
the hymn,

    "Rock of Ages, clept for me,"

nor did she hear a word of his discourse.

At the conclusion of the house services, and before the journey to the
graveyard, the supper was served, first to the mourners, and then to
all those who expected to follow the body to the grave. The third
table, for those who had prepared the meal, and the fourth, for the
hostlers, were set after the departure of the funeral procession.

Convention has prescribed that the funeral meal shall consist
invariably of cold meat, cheese, all sorts of stewed dried fruits,
pickles, "lemon rice" (a dish never omitted), and coffee.

As no one household possesses enough dishes for such an occasion, two
chests of dishes owned by the Mennonite church are sent to the house of
mourning whenever needed by a member of the Meeting.

The Mennonites present suffered a shock to their feelings upon the
appearance of the widow of the deceased Adam Schunk, for--unprecedented
circumstance!--she wore over her black Mennonite hood a crape veil!
This was an innovation nothing short of revolutionary, and the brethren
and sisters, to whom their prescribed form of dress was sacred, were
bewildered to know how they ought to regard such a digression from
their rigid customs.

"I guess Mandy's proud of herself with her weil," Tillie's stepmother
whispered to her as she gave the girl a tray of coffee-cups to deliver
about the table.

But Tillie's thoughts were inward bent, and she heeded not what went on
about her. Fear of death and the judgment, a longing to find the peace
which could come only with an assured sense of her salvation, darkness
as to how that peace might be found, a sense of the weakness of her
flesh and spirit before her father's undoubted opposition to her
"turning plain," as well as his certain refusal to supply the
wherewithal for her Mennonite garb, should she indeed be led of the
Spirit to "give herself up,"--all these warring thoughts and emotions
stamped their lines upon the girl's sweet, troubled countenance, as,
blind and deaf to her surroundings, she lent her helping hand almost as
one acting in a trance.




XI

"POP! I FEEL TO BE PLAIN"


The psychical and, considering the critical age of the young girl, the
physiological processes by which Tillie was finally led to her
conversion it is not necessary to analyze; for the experience is too
universal, and differs too slightly in individual cases, to require
comment. Perhaps in Tillie's case it was a more intense and permanent
emotion than with the average convert. Otherwise, deep and earnest
though it was with her, it was not unique.

The New Mennonite sermon which had been the instrument to determine the
channel in which should flow the emotional tide of her awakening
womanhood, had convinced her that if she would be saved, she dare not
compromise with the world by joining one of those churches as, for
instance, the Methodist or the Evangelical, which permitted every sort
of worldly indulgence,--fashionable dress, attendance at the circus,
voting at the polls, musical instruments, "pleasure-seeking," and many
other things which the Word of God forbade. She must give herself up to
the Lord absolutely and entirely, forswearing all the world's
allurements. The New Mennonites alone, of all the Christian sects,
lived up to this scriptural ideal, and with them Tillie would cast her
lot.

This austere body of Christians could not so easily have won her heart
had it forbidden her cherished ambition, constantly encouraged and
stimulated by Miss Margaret, to educate herself. Fortunately for her
peace of mind, the New Mennonites were not, like the Amish, "enemies to
education," though to be sure, as the preacher, Brother Abram
Underwocht, reminded her in her private talk with him, "To be dressy,
or TOO well educated, or stylish, didn't belong to Christ and the
apostles; they were plain folks."

It was in the lull of work that came, even in the Getz family, on
Sunday afternoon, that Tillie, summoning to her aid all the fervor of
her new-found faith, ventured to face the ordeal of opening up with her
father the subject of her conversion.

He was sitting on the kitchen porch, dozing over a big Bible spread
open on his knee. The children were playing on the lawn, and Mrs. Getz
was taking her Sunday afternoon nap on the kitchen settee.

Tillie seated herself on the porch step at her father's feet. Her eyes
were clear and bright, but her face burned, and her heart beat heavily
in her heaving bosom.

"Pop!" she timidly roused him from his dozing.

"Heh?" he muttered gruffly, opening his eyes and lifting his head.

"Pop, I got to speak somepin to you."

An unusual note in her voice arrested him, and, wide awake now, he
looked down at her inquiringly.

"Well? What, then?"

"Pop! I feel to be plain."

"YOU! Feel fur turnin' plain! Why, you ain't old enough to know the
meanin' of it! What d' you want about that there theology?"

"I'm fourteen, pop. And the Spirit has led me to see the light. I have
gave myself up," she affirmed quietly, but with a quiver in her voice.

"You have gave yourself up!" her father incredulously repeated.

"Yes, sir. And I'm loosed of all things that belong to the world. And
now I feel fur wearin' the plain dress, fur that's according to
Scripture, which says, 'all is wanity!'"

Never before in her life had Tillie spoken so many words to her father
at one time, and he stared at her in astonishment.

"Yes, you're growin' up, that's so. I ain't noticed how fast you was
growin'. It don't seem no time since you was born. But it's fourteen
years back a'ready--yes, that's so. Well, Tillie, if you feel fur
joinin' church, you're got to join on to the Evangelicals. I ain't
leavin' you follow no such nonsense as to turn plain. That don't belong
to us Getzes. We're Evangelicals this long time a'ready."

"Aunty Em was a Getz, and SHE's gave herself up long ago."

"Well, she's the only one by the name Getz that I ever knowed to be so
foolish! I'm an Evangelical, and what's good enough fur your pop will
do YOU, I guess!"

"The Evangelicals ain't according to Scripture, pop. They have wine at
the Communion, and the Bible says, 'Taste not, handle not,' and 'Look
not upon the wine when it is red.'"

That she should criticize the Evangelicals and pronounce them
unscriptural was disintegrating to all his ideas of the subjection, of
children. His sun-burned face grew darker.

"Mebbe you don't twist that there Book! Gawd he wouldn't of created
wine to be made if it would be wrong fur to look at it! You can't come
over that, can you? Them Scripture you spoke, just mean not to drink to
drunkenness, nor eat to gluttonness. But," he sternly added, "it ain't
fur you to answer up to your pop! I ain't leavin' you dress plain--and
that's all that's to say!"

"I got to do it, pop," Tillie's low voice answered, "I must obey to
Christ."

"What you sayin' to me? That you got to do somepin I tole you you
haven't the dare to do? Are you sayin' that to ME, Tillie? Heh?"

"I got to obey to Christ," she repeated, her face paling.

"You think! Well, we'll see about that oncet! You leave me see you
obeyin' to any one before your pop, and you'll soon get learnt better!
How do you bring it out that the Scripture says, 'Childern, obey your
parents'?"

"'Obey your parents in the Lord,'" Tillie amended.

"Well, you'll be obeyin' to the Scripture AND your parent by joinin'
the Evangelicals. D' you understand?"

"The Evangelicals don't hold to Scripture, pop. They enlist. And we
don't read of Christ takin' any interest in war."

"Yes, but in the Old Dispensation them old kings did it, and certainly
they was good men! They're in the Bible!"

"But we're livin' under the New Dispensation. And a many things is
changed to what they were under the Old. Pop, I can't dress fashionable
any more."

"Now, look here, Tillie, I oughtn't argy no words with you, fur you're
my child and you're got the right to mind me just because I say it. But
can't you see the inconsistentness of the plain people? Now a New
Mennonite he says his conscience won't leave him wear grand [wear
worldly dress] but he'll make his livin' in Lancaster city by keepin' a
jew'lry-store. And yet them Mennonites won't leave a sister keep a
millinery-shop!"

"But," Tillie tried to hold her ground, "there's watches, pop, and
clocks that jew'lers sells. They're useful. We got to have watches and
clocks. Millinery is only pleasing to the eye."

"Well, the women couldn't go bare-headed neither, could they? And is
ear-rings and such things like them useful? And all them fancy things
they keep in their dry-goods stores? Och, they're awful inconsistent
that way! I ain't got no use fur New Mennonites! Why, here one day,
when your mom was livin' yet, I owed a New Mennonite six cents, and I
handed him a dime and he couldn't change it out, but he sayed he'd send
me the four cents. Well, I waited and waited, and he never sent it.
Then I bought such a postal-card and wrote it in town to him yet. And
that didn't fetch the four cents neither. I wrote to him backward and
forward till I had wrote three cards a'ready, and then I seen I
wouldn't gain nothin' by writin' one more if he did pay me, and if he
didn't pay I'd lose that other cent yet. So I let it. Now that's a New
Mennonite fur you! Do you call that consistentness?"

"But it's the Word of Gawd I go by, pop, not by the weak brethren."

"Well, you'll go by your pop's word and not join to them New
Mennonites! Now I don't want to hear no more!"

"Won't you buy me the plain garb, pop?"

"Buy you the plain garb! Now look here, Tillie. If ever you ast me
again to leave you join to anything but the Evangelicals, or speak
somepin to me about buyin' you the plain garb, I'm usin' the strap. Do
you hear me?"

"Pop," said Tillie, solemnly, her face very white, "I'll always obey to
you where I can--where I think it's right to. But if you won't buy me
the plain dress and cap, Aunty Em Wackernagel's going to. She says she
never knew what happiness it was to be had in this life till she gave
herself up and dressed plain and loosed herself from all worldly
things. And I feel just like her."

"All right--just you come wearin' them Mennonite costumes 'round me
oncet! I'll burn 'em up like what I burned up them novels where you
lent off of your teacher! And I'll punish you so's you won't try it a
second time to do what I tell you you haven't the dare to do!"

The color flowed back into Tillie's white face as he spoke. She was
crimson now as she rose from the porch step and turned away from him to
go into the house.

Jake Getz realized, as with a sort of dull wonder his eyes followed
her, that there was a something in his daughter's face this day, and in
the bearing of her young frame as she walked before him, which he was
not wont to see, which he did not understand, and with which he felt he
could not cope. The vague sense of uneasiness which it gave him
strengthened his resolve to crush, with a strong hand, this budding
insubordination.

Two uneventful weeks passed by, during which Tillie's quiet and dutiful
demeanor almost disarmed her father's threatening watchfulness of her;
so that when, one Sunday afternoon, at four o'clock, she returned from
a walk to her Aunty Em Wackernagel's, clad in the meek garb of the New
Mennonites, his amazement at her intrepidity was even greater than his
anger.

The younger children, in high glee at what to them was a most comical
transformation in their elder sister, danced around her with shrieks of
laughter, crying out at the funny white cap which she wore, and the
prim little three-cornered cape falling over her bosom, designed
modestly to cover the vanity of woman's alluring form.

Mrs. Getz, mechanically moving about the kitchen to get the supper,
paused in her work only long enough to remark with stupid astonishment,
"Did you, now, get religion, Tillie?"

"Yes, ma'am. I've gave myself up."

"Where did you come by the plain dress?"

"Aunty Em bought it for me and helped me make it."

Her father had followed her in from the porch and now came up to her as
she stood in the middle of the kitchen. The children scattered at his
approach.

"You go up-stairs and take them clo'es off!" he commanded. "I ain't
leavin' you wear 'em one hour in this house!"

"I have no others to put on, pop," Tillie gently answered, her soft
eyes meeting his with an absence of fear which puzzled and baffled him.

"Where's your others, then?"

"I've let 'em at Aunty Em's. She took 'em in exchange for my plain
dress. She says she can use 'em on 'Manda and Rebecca."

"Then you walk yourself right back over to the hotel and get 'em back
of? of her, and let them clo'es you got on. Go!" he roughly pointed to
the door.

"She wouldn't give 'em back to me. She'd know I hadn't ought to yield
up to temptation, and she'd help me to resist by refusing me my
fashionable clo'es."

"You tell her if you come back home without 'em, I'm whippin' you!
She'll give 'em to you then."

"She'd say my love to Christ ought not to be so weak but I can bear
anything you want to do to me, pop. She had to take an awful lot off of
gran'pop when she turned plain. Pop," she added earnestly, "no matter
what you do to me, I ain't givin' 'way; I'm standin' firm to serve
Christ!"

"We'll see oncet!" her father grimly answered, striding across the room
and taking his strap from its corner in the kitchen cupboard he grasped
Tillie's slender shoulder and lifted his heavy arm.

And now for the first time in her life his wife interposed a word
against his brutality.

"Jake!"

In astonishment he turned to her. She was as pale as her stepdaughter.

"Jake! If she HAS got religion, you'll have awful bad luck if you try
to get her away from it!"

"I ain't sayin' she can't get RELIGION if she wants! To be sure, I
brung her up to be a Christian. But I don't hold to this here nonsense
of turnin' plain, and I tole her so, and she's got to obey to me or
I'll learn her!"

"You'll have bad luck if you whip her fur somepin like this here," his
wife repeated. "Don't you mind how when Aunty Em turned plain and
gran'pop he acted to her so ugly that way, it didn't rain fur two weeks
and his crops was spoilt, and he got that boil yet on his neck! Yes,
you'll see oncet," she warned him "if you use the strap fur somepin
like what this is, what you'll mebbe come by yet!"

"Och, you're foolish!" he answered, but his tone was not confident. His
raised arm dropped to his side and he looked uneasily into Tillie's
face, while he still kept his painful grasp of her shoulder.

The soft bright eyes of the young girl met his, not with defiance, but
with a light in them that somehow brought before his mind the look her
mother had worn the night she died. Superstition was in his blood, and
he shuddered inwardly at his uncanny sense of mystery before this
unfamiliar, illumined countenance of his daughter. The exalted soul of
the girl cast a spell which even HIS unsensitive spirit could keenly
feel, and something stirred in his breast--the latent sense of
affectionate, protecting fatherhood.

Tillie saw and felt this sudden change in him. She lifted her free hand
and laid it on his arm, her lips quivering. "Father!" she half
whispered.

She had never called him that before, and it seemed strangely to bring
home to him what, in this crisis of his child's life, was due to her
from him, her only living parent.

Suddenly he released her shoulder and tossed away the strap. "I see I
wouldn't be doin' right to oppose you in this here, Tillie. Well, I'm
glad, fur all, that I ain't whippin' you. It goes ag'in' me to hit you
since you was sick that time. You're gettin' full big, too, to be
punished that there way, fur all I always sayed still I'd never leave a
child of mine get ahead of me, no matter how big they was, so long as
they lived off of me. But this here's different. You're feelin'
conscientious about this here matter, and I ain't hinderin' you."

To Tillie's unspeakable amazement, he laid his hand on her head and
held it there for an instant. "Gawd bless you, my daughter, and help
you to serve the Lord acceptable!"

So that crisis was past.

But Tillie knew, that night, as she rubbed witch-hazel on her sore
shoulder, that a far worse struggle was before her. In seeking to carry
out the determination that burned in her heart to get an education, no
aid could come to her as it had to-day, from her father's sense of
religious awe. Would she be able, she wondered, to stand firm against
his opposition when, a second time, it came to an issue between them?




XII

ABSALOM KEEPS COMPANY


Tillie wrote to Miss Margaret (she could not learn to call her Mrs.
Lansing) how that she had "given herself up and turned plain," and Miss
Margaret, seeing how sacred this experience was to the young girl,
treated the subject with all respect and even reverence.

The correspondence between these two, together with the books which
from time to time came to the girl from her faithful friend, did more
toward Tillie's growth and development along lines of which her parents
had no suspicion, than all the schooling at William Penn, under the
instruction of the average "Millersville Normal," could ever have
accomplished.

And her tongue, though still very provincial, soon lost much of its
native dialect, through her constant reading and study.

Of course whenever her father discovered her with her books he made her
suffer.

"You're got education enough a'ready," he would insist. "And too much
fur your own good. Look at me--I was only educated with a Testament and
a spelling-book and a slate. We had no such a blackboards even, to
recite on. And do _I_ look as if I need to know any more 'n what I know
a'ready?"

Tillie bore her punishments like a martyr--and continued
surreptitiously to read and to study whenever and whatever she could;
and not even the extreme conscientiousness of a New Mennonite faltered
at this filial disobedience. She obeyed her father implicitly, however
tyrannical he was, to the point where he bade her suppress and kill all
the best that God had given her of mind and heart. Then she revolted;
and she never for an instant doubted her entire justification in
eluding or defying his authority.

There was another influence besides her books and Miss Margaret's
letters which, unconsciously to herself, was educating Tillie at this
time. Her growing fondness for stealing off to the woods not far from
the farm, of climbing to the hill-top beyond the creek, or walking over
the fields under the wide sky--not only in the spring and summer, but
at all times of the year--was yielding her a richness, a depth and
breadth, of experience that nothing else could have given her.

A nature deeply sensitive to the mysterious appeal of sky and green
earth, of deep, shady forest and glistening water, when unfolding in
daily touch with these things, will learn to see life with a broader,
saner mind and catch glimpses and vistas of truth with a clearer vision
than can ever come to one whose most susceptible years are spent walled
in and overtopped by the houses of the city that shut out and stifle
"the larger thought of God." And Tillie, in spite of her narrowing New
Mennonite "convictions," did reach through her growing love for and
intimacy with Nature a plane of thought and feeling which was
immeasurably above her perfunctory creed.

Sometimes the emotions excited by her solitary walks gave the young
girl greater pain than happiness--yet it was a pain she would not have
been spared, for she knew, though the knowledge was never formulated in
her thought, that in some precious, intimate way her suffering set her
apart and above the villagers and farming people about her--those whose
placid, contented eyes never strayed from the potato-patch to the
distant hills, or lifted themselves from the goodly tobacco-fields to
the wide blue heavens.

Thus, cramped and crushing as much of her life was, it had--as all
conditions must have--its compensations; and many of the very
circumstances which at the time seemed most unbearable brought forth in
later years rich fruit.

And so, living under her father's watchful eye and relentless
rule,--with long days of drudgery and outward acquiescence in his
scheme of life that she devote herself, mind, body, and soul, to the
service of himself, his wife, and their children, and in return to be
poorly fed and scantily clad,--Tillie nevertheless grew up in a world
apart, hidden to the sealed vision of those about her; as unknown to
them in her real life as though they had never looked upon her face;
and while her father never for an instant doubted the girl's entire
submission to him, she was day by day waxing stronger in her resolve to
heed Miss Margaret's constant advice and make a fight for her right to
the education her father had denied her, and for a life other than that
to which his will would consign her.

There were dark times when her steadfast purpose seemed impossible of
fulfilment. But Tillie felt she would rather die in the struggle than
become the sort of apathetic household drudge she beheld in her
stepmother--a condition into which it would be so easy to sink, once
she loosed her wagon from its star.

It was when Tillie was seventeen years old--a slight, frail girl, with
a look in her eyes as of one who lives in two worlds--that Absalom
Puntz, one Sunday evening in the fall of the year, saw her safe home
from meeting and asked permission to "keep comp'ny" with her.

Now that morning Tillie had received a letter from Miss Margaret (sent
to her, as always, under cover to the doctor), and Absalom's company on
the way from church was a most unwelcome interruption to her happy
brooding over the precious messages of love and helpfulness which those
letters always brought her.

A request for permission to "keep comp'ny" with a young lady meant a
very definite thing in Canaan Township. "Let's try each other," was
what it signified; and acceptance of the proposition involved on each
side an exclusion of all association with others of the opposite sex.
Tillie of course understood this.

"But you're of the World's people, Absalom," her soft, sweet voice
answered him. They were walking along in the dim evening on the high
dusty pike toward the Getz farm. "And I'm a member of meeting. I can't
marry out of the meeting."

"This long time a'ready, Tillie, I was thinkin' about givin' myself up
and turnin' plain," he assured her. "To be sure, I know I'd have to, to
git you. You've took notice, ain't you, how reg'lar I 'tend meeting?
Well, oncet me and you kin settle this here question of gittin'
married, I'm turnin' plain as soon as I otherwise [possibly] kin."

"I have never thought about keeping company, Absalom."

"Nearly all the girls around here as old as you has their friend
a'ready."

Absalom was twenty years old, stoutly built and coarse-featured, a
deeply ingrained obstinacy being the only characteristic his heavy
countenance suggested. He still attended the district school for a few
months of the winter term. His father was one of the richest farmers of
the neighborhood, and Absalom, being his only child, was considered a
matrimonial prize.

"Is there nobody left for you but me?" Tillie inquired in a
matter-of-fact tone. The conjugal relation, as she saw it in her
father's home and in the neighborhood, with its entirely practical
basis and utter absence of sentiment, had no attraction or interest for
her, and she had long since made up her mind that she would none of it.

"There ain't much choice," granted Absalom. "But I anyways would pick
out you, Tillie."

"Why me?"

"I dunno. I take to you. And I seen a'ready how handy you was at the
work still. Mom says, too, you'd make me a good housekeeper."

Tillie never dreamed of resenting this practical approval of her
qualifications for the post with which Absalom designed to honor her.
It was because of her familiarity with such matrimonial standards as
these that from her childhood up she had determined never to marry.
From what she gathered of Miss Margaret's married life, through her
letters, and from what she learned from the books and magazines which
she read, she knew that out in the great unknown world there existed
another basis of marriage. But she did not understand it and she never
thought about it. The strongly emotional tide of her girlhood, up to
this time, had been absorbed by her remarkable love for Miss Margaret
and by her earnest religiousness.

"There's no use in your wasting your time keeping company with me,
Absalom. I never intend to marry. I've made up my mind."

"Is it that your pop won't leave you, or whatever?"

"I never asked him. I don't know what he would say."

"Mom spoke somepin about mebbe your pop he'd want to keep you at home,
you bein' so useful to him and your mom. But I sayed when you come
eighteen, you're your own boss. Ain't, Tillie?"

"Father probably would object to my marrying because I'm needed at
home," Tillie agreed. "That's why they wouldn't leave me go to school
after I was eleven. But I don't want to marry."

"You leave me be your steady friend, Tillie, and I'll soon get you over
them views," urged Absalom, confidently.

But Tillie shook her head. "It would just waste your time, Absalom."

In Canaan Township it would have been considered highly dishonorable
for a girl to allow a young man to "sit up with her Sundays" if she
definitely knew she would never marry him. Time meant money, and even
the time spent in courting must be judiciously used.

"I don't mind if I do waste my time settin' up with you Sundays,
Tillie. I take to you that much, it's something surprising, now! Will
you give me the dare to come next Sunday?"

"If you don't mind wasting your time--" Tillie reluctantly granted.

"It won't be wasted. I'll soon get you to think different to what you
think now. You just leave me set up with you a couple Sundays and see!"

"I know I'll never think any different, Absalom. You must not suppose
that I will."

"Is it somepin you're got ag'in' me?" he asked incredulously, for he
knew he was considered a prize. "I'm well-fixed enough, ain't I? I'd
make you a good purvider, Tillie. And I don't addict to no bad habits.
I don't chew. Nor I don't drink. Nor I don't swear any. The most I ever
sayed when I was spited was 'confound it.'"

"It isn't that I have anything against you, Absalom, especially.
But--look here, Absalom, if you were a woman, would YOU marry? What
does a woman gain?"

Absalom stared at her in the dusky evening light of the high road. To
ask of his slow-moving brain that it question the foundations of the
universe and wrestle with a social and psychological problem like this
made the poor youth dumb with bewilderment.

"Why SHOULD a woman get married?" Tillie repeated.

"That's what a woman's FUR," Absalom found his tongue to say.

"She loses everything and gains nothing."

"She gets kep'," Absalom argued.

"Like the horses. Only not so carefully. No, thank you, Absalom. I can
keep myself."

"I'd keep you better 'n your pop keeps you, anyways, Tillie. I'd make
you a good purvider."

"I won't ever marry," Tillie repeated.

"I didn't know you was so funny," Absalom sullenly answered. "You might
be glad I want to be your reg'lar friend."

"No," said Tillie, "I don't care about it."

They walked on in silence for a few minutes. Tillie looked away into
the starlit night and thought of Miss Margaret and wished she were
alone, that her thoughts might be uninterrupted. Absalom, at her side,
kicked up the dust with his heavy shoes, as he sulkily hung his head.

Presently he spoke again.

"Will you leave me come to see you Sundays, still, if I take my chancet
that I'm wastin' my time?"

"If you'll leave it that way," Tillie acquiesced, "and not hold me to
anything."

"All right. Only you won't leave no one else set up with you, ain't
not?"

"There isn't any one else."

"But some chance time another feller might turn up oncet that wants to
keep comp'ny with you too."

"I won't promise anything, Absalom. If you want to come Sundays to see
me and the folks, you can. That's all I'll say."

"I never seen such a funny girl as what you are!" growled Absalom.

Tillie made no reply, and again they went on in silence.

"Say!" It was Absalom who finally spoke.

Tillie's absent, dreamy gaze came down from the stars and rested upon
his heavy, dull face.

"Ezra Herr he's resigned William Penn. He's gettin' more pay at Abra'm
Lincoln in Janewille. It comes unhandy, his leavin', now the term's
just started and most all the applicants took a'ready. Pop he got a
letter from in there at Lancaster off of Superintendent Reingruber and
he's sendin' us a applicant out till next Saturday three weeks--fur the
directors to see oncet if he'll do."

Absalom's father was secretary of the Board, and Mr. Getz was the
treasurer.

"Pop he's goin' over to see your pop about it till to-morrow evenin'
a'ready if he can make it suit."

"When does Ezra go?" Tillie inquired. The New Mennonite rule which
forbade the use of all titles had led to the custom in this
neighborhood, so populated with Mennonites, of calling each one by his
Christian name.

"Till next Friday three weeks," Absalom replied. "Pop says he don't
know what to think about this here man Superintendent Reingruber's
sendin' out. He ain't no Millersville Normal. The superintendent says
he's a 'Harvard gradyate'--whatever that is, pop says! Pop he sayed it
ain't familiar with him what that there is. And I guess the other
directors don't know neither. Pop he sayed when we're payin' as much as
forty dollars a month we had ought, now, to have a Millersville Normal,
and nothin' less. Who wants to pay forty dollars a month fur such a
Harvard gradyate that we don't know right what it is."

"What pay will Ezra get at Janeville?" Tillie asked. Her heart beat
fast as she thought how SHE might, perhaps, in another year be the
applicant for a vacancy at William Penn.

"Around forty-five dollars," Absalom answered.

"Oh!" Tillie said; "it seems so much, don't it?"

"Fur settin' and doin' nothin' but hearin' off spellin' and readin' and
whatever, it's too much! Pop says he's goin' to ast your pop and the
rest of the Board if they hadn't ought to ast this here Harvard
gradyate to take a couple dollars less, seein' he ain't no Millersville
Normal."

They had by this time reached the farm, and Tillie, not very warmly,
asked Absalom whether he would "come in and sit awhile." She almost
sighed audibly as he eagerly consented.

When he had left at twelve o'clock that night, she softly climbed the
stairs to her room, careful not to disturb the sleeping household.
Tillie wondered why it was that every girl of her acquaintance exulted
in being asked to keep company with a gentleman friend. She had found
"sitting up" a more fatiguing task than even the dreaded Monday's
washing which would confront her on the morrow.

"Seein' it's the first time me and you set up together, I mebbe better
not stay just so late," Absalom had explained when, after three hours'
courting, he had reluctantly risen to take his leave, under the firm
conviction, as Tillie plainly saw, that she felt as sorry to have him
go as evidently he was to part from her!

"How late," thought Tillie, "will he stay the SECOND time he sits up
with me? And what," she wondered, "do other girls see in it?"

The following Sunday night, Absalom came again, and this time he stayed
until one o'clock, with the result that on the following Monday morning
Tillie overslept herself and was one hour late in starting the washing.

It was that evening, after supper, while Mrs. Getz was helping her
husband make his toilet for a meeting of the School Board--at which the
application of that suspicious character, the Harvard graduate, was to
be considered--that the husband and wife discussed these significant
Sunday night visits. Mrs. Getz opened up the subject while she
performed the wifely office of washing her husband's neck, his
increasing bulk making that duty a rather difficult one for him.
Standing over him as he sat in a chair in the kitchen, holding on his
knees a tin basin full of soapy water, she scrubbed his fat, sunburned
neck with all the vigor and enthusiasm that she would have applied to
the cleaning of the kitchen porch or the scouring of an iron skillet.

A custom prevailed in the county of leaving one's parlor plainly
furnished, or entirely empty, until the eldest daughter should come of
age; it was then fitted up in style, as a place to which she and her
"regular friend" could retire from the eyes of the girl's folks of a
Sunday night to do their "setting up." The occasion of a girl's
"furnishing" was a notable one, usually celebrated by a party; and it
was this fact that led her stepmother to remark presently:

"Say, pop, are you furnishin' fur Tillie, now she's comin' eighteen
years old?"

"I ain't thought about it," Mr. Getz answered shortly. "That front
room's furnished good enough a'ready. No--I ain't spendin' any!"

"Seein' she's a member and wears plain, it wouldn't cost wery expensive
to furnish fur her, fur she hasn't the dare to have nothin' stylish
like a organ or gilt-framed landscapes or sich stuffed furniture that
way."

"The room's good enough the way it is," repeated Mr. Getz. "I don't see
no use spendin' on it."

"It needs new paper and carpet. Pop, it'll get put out if you don't
furnish fur her. The neighbors'll talk how you're so close with your
own child after she worked fur you so good still. I don't like it so
well, pop, havin' the neighbors talk."

"Leave 'em talk. Their talkin' don't cost ME nothin'. I AIN'T
furnishin'!" His tone was obstinate and angry.

His wife rubbed him down with a crash towel as vigorously as she had
washed him, then fastened his shirt, dipped the family comb in the
soapy water and began with artistic care to part and comb his hair.

"Absalom Puntz he's a nice party, pop. He'll be well-fixed till his
pop's passed away a'ready."

"You think! Well, now look here, mom!" Mr. Getz spoke with stern
decision. "Tillie ain't got the dare to keep comp'ny Sundays! It made
her a whole hour late with the washin' this mornin'. I'm tellin' her
she's got to tell Absalom Puntz he can't come no more."

Mrs. Getz paused with comb poised in air, and her feeble jaw dropped in
astonishment.

"Why, pop!" she said. "Ain't you leavin' Tillie keep comp'ny?"

"No," affirmed Mr. Getz. "I ain't. What does a body go to the bother of
raisin' childern FUR? Just to lose 'em as soon as they are growed
enough to help earn a little? I ain't LEAVIN' Tillie get married! She's
stayin' at home to help her pop and mom--except in winter when they
ain't so much work, and mebbe then I'm hirin' her out to Aunty Em at
the hotel where she can earn a little, too, to help along. She can easy
earn enough to buy the children's winter clo'es and gums and
school-books."

"When she comes eighteen, pop, she'll have the right to get married
whether or no you'd conceited you wouldn't give her the dare."

"If I say I ain't buyin' her her aus styer, Absalom Puntz nor no other
feller would take her."

An "aus styer" is the household outfit always given to a bride by her
father.

"Well, to be sure," granted Mrs. Getz, "I'd like keepin' Tillie home to
help me out with the work still. I didn't see how I was ever goin' to
get through without her. But I thought when Absalom Puntz begin to come
Sundays, certainly you'd be fur her havin' him. I was sayin' to her
only this mornin' that if she didn't want to dishearten Absalom from
comin' to set up with her, she'd have to take more notice to him and
not act so dopplig with him--like as if she didn't care whether or no
he made up to her. I tole her I'd think, now, she'd be wonderful
pleased at his wantin' her, and him so well-fixed. Certainly I never
conceited you'd be ag'in' it. Tillie she didn't answer nothin'.
Sometimes I do now think Tillie's some different to what other girls
is."

"I'd be glad," said Jacob Getz in a milder tone, "if she ain't set on
havin' him. I was some oneasy she might take it a little hard when I
tole her she darsent get married."

"Och, Tillie she never takes nothin' hard," Mrs. Getz answered easily.
"She ain't never ast me you goin' to furnish fur her. She don't take no
interest. She's so funny that way. I think to myself, still, Tillie is,
now, a little dumm!"

It happened that while this dialogue was taking place, Tillie was in
the room above the kitchen, putting the two most recently arrived Getz
babies to bed; and as she sat near the open register with a baby on her
lap, every word that passed between her father and stepmother was
perfectly audible to her.

With growing bitterness she listened to her father's frank avowal of
his selfish designs. At the same time she felt a thrill of exultation,
as she thought of the cherished secret locked in her breast--hidden the
more securely from those with whom she seemed to live nearest. How
amazed they would be, her stolid, unsuspicious parents, when they
discovered that she had been secretly studying and, with Miss
Margaret's help, preparing herself for the high calling of a teacher!
One more year, now, and she would be ready, Miss Margaret assured her,
to take the county superintendent's examination for a certificate to
teach. Then good-by to household drudgery and the perpetual
self-sacrifice that robbed her of all that was worth while in life.

With a serene mind, Tillie rose, with the youngest baby in her arms,
and tenderly tucked it in its little bed.




XIII

EZRA HERR, PEDAGOGUE


It was a few days later, at the supper-table, that Tillie's father made
an announcement for which she was not wholly unprepared.

"I'm hirin' you out this winter, Tillie, at the hotel. Aunty Em says
she's leavin' both the girls go to school again this winter and she'll
need hired help. She'll pay me two dollars a week fur you. She'll pay
it to me and I'll buy you what you need, still, out of it. You're goin'
till next Monday."

Tillie's heart leaped high with pleasure at this news. She was fond of
her Aunty Em; she knew that life at the country hotel would be varied
and interesting in comparison with the dull, grubbing existence of her
own home; she would have to work very hard, of course, but not so hard,
so unceasingly, as under her father's eye; and she would have absolute
freedom to devote her spare time to her books. The thought of escaping
from her father's watchfulness, and the prospect of hours of safe and
uninterrupted study, filled her with secret joy.

"I tole Aunty Em she's not to leave you waste no time readin'; when she
don't need you, you're to come home and help mom still. Mom she says
she can't get through the winter sewin' without you. Well, Aunty Em she
says you can sew evenin's over there at the HOtel, on the childern's
clo'es. Mom she can easy get through the other work without you, now
Sallie's goin' on thirteen. Till December a'ready Sally'll be thirteen.
And the winter work's easy to what the summer is. In summer, to be
sure, you'll have to come home and help me and mom. But in winter I'm
hirin' you out."

"But Sally ain't as handy as what Tillie is," said Mrs. Getz,
plaintively. "And I don't see how I'm goin' to get through oncet
without Tillie."

"Sally's got to LEARN to be handier, that's all. She's got to get
learnt like what I always learnt Tillie fur you."

Fire flashed in Tillie's soft eyes--a momentary flame of shame and
aversion; if her blinded father had seen and understood, he would have
realized how little, after all, he had ever succeeded in "learning" her
the subservience he demanded of his children.

As for the warning to her aunt, she knew that it would be ignored; that
Aunty Em would never interfere with the use she made of the free time
allowed her, no matter what her father's orders were to the contrary.

"And you ain't to have Absalom Puntz comin' over there Sundays
neither," her father added. "I tole Aunty Em like I tole you the other
day, I ain't leavin' you keep comp'ny. I raised you, now you have the
right to work and help along a little. It's little enough a girl can
earn anyways."

Tillie made no comment. Her silence was of course understood by her
father to mean submission; while her stepmother felt in her heart a
contempt for a meekness that would bear, without a word of protest, the
loss of a steady friend so well-fixed and so altogether desirable as
Absalom Puntz.

In Absalom's two visits Tillie had been sufficiently impressed with the
steadiness of purpose and obstinacy of the young man's character to
feel appalled at the fearful task of resisting his dogged determination
to marry her. So confident he evidently was of ultimately winning her
that at times Tillie found herself quite sharing his confidence in the
success of his courting, which her father's interdict she knew would
not interfere with in the least. She always shuddered at the thought of
being Absalom's wife; and a feeling she could not always fling off, as
of some impending doom, at times buried all the high hopes which for
the past seven years had been the very breath of her life.

Tillie had one especially strong reason for rejoicing in the prospect
of going to the village for the winter. The Harvard graduate, if
elected, would no doubt board at the hotel, or necessarily near by, and
she could get him to lend her books and perhaps to give her some help
with her studies.

The village of New Canaan and all the township were curious to see this
stranger. The school directors had felt that they were conceding a good
deal in consenting to consider the application of sueh an unknown
quantity, when they could, at forty dollars a month, easily secure the
services of a Millersville Normal. But the stress that had been brought
to bear upon them by the county superintendent, whose son had been a
classmate of the candidate, had been rather too strong to be resisted;
and so the "Harvard gradyate man" was coming.

That afternoon Tillie had walked over in a pouring rain to William Penn
to carry "gums" and umbrellas to her four younger brothers and sisters,
and she had realized, with deep exultation, while listening to Ezra
Herr's teaching, that she was already far better equipped than was Ezra
to do the work he was doing,--and HE was a Millersville Normal!

It happened that Ezra was receiving a visit from a committee of
Janeville school directors, and he had departed from his every-day
mechanical style of teaching in favor of some fancy methods which he
had imbibed at the Normal School during his attendance at the spring
term, and which he reserved for use on occasions like the present.
Tillie watched him with profound attention, but hardly with profound
respect.

"Childern," Ezra said, with a look of deep thought, as he impressively
paced up and down before the class of small boys and girls ranged on
the platform, "now, childern, what's this reading lesson ABOUT?"

"'Bout a apple-tree!" answered several eager little voices.

"Yes," said Ezra. "About an apple-tree. Correct. Now,
childern--er--what grows on apple-trees, heh?"

"Apples!" answered the intelligent class.

"Correct. Apples. And--now--what was it that came to the apple-tree?"

"A little bird."

"Yes. A bird came to the apple tree. Well--er," he floundered for a
moment, then, by a sudden inspiration, "what can a bird do?"

"Fly! and sing!"

"A bird can fly and sing," Ezra nodded. "Very good. Now, Sadie, you
dare begin. I 'll leave each one read a werse."

The next recitation was a Fourth Reader lesson consisting of a speech
of Daniel Webster's, the import of which not one of the children, if
indeed the teacher himself, had the faintest suspicion. And so the
class was permitted to proceed, without interruption, in its labored
conning of the massive eloquence of that great statesman; and the
directors presently took their departure in the firm conviction that in
Ezra Herr they had made a good investment of the forty-five dollars a
month appropriated to their town out of the State treasury, and they
agreed, on their way back to Janeville, that New Canaan was to be
pitied for having to put up with anything so unheard-of as "a Harvard
gradyate or whatever," after having had the advantages of an educator
like Ezra Herr.

And Tillie, as she walked home with her four brothers and sisters,
hoped, for the sake of her own advancement, that a Harvard graduate was
at least not LESS intelligent than a Millersville Normal.




XIV

THE HARVARD GRADUATE


That a man holding a Harvard degree should consider so humble an
educational post as that of New Canaan needs a word of explanation.

Walter Fairchilds was the protege of his uncle, the High Church bishop
of a New England State, who had practically, though not legally,
adopted him, upon the death of his father, when the boy was fourteen
years old, his mother having died at his birth.

It was tacitly understood by Walter that his uncle was educating him
for the priesthood. His life, from the time the bishop took charge of
him until he was ready for college, was spent in Church
boarding-schools.

A spiritually minded, thoughtful boy, of an emotional temperament which
responded to every appeal of beauty, whether of form, color, sound, or
ethics, Walter easily fell in with his uncle's designs for him, and
rivaled him in the fervor of his devotion to the esthetic ritual of his
Church.

His summer vacations were spent at Bar Harbor with the bishop's family,
which consisted of his wife and two anemic daughters. They were people
of limited interests, who built up barriers about their lives on all
sides; social hedges which excluded all humanity but a select and very
dull, uninteresting circle; intellectual walls which never admitted a
stray unconventional idea; moral demarcations which nourished within
them the Mammon of self-righteousness, and theological harriers which
shut out the sunlight of a broad charity.

Therefore, when in the course of his career at Harvard, Walter
Fairchilds discovered that intellectually he had outgrown not only the
social creed of the divine right of the well-born, in which these
people had educated him, but their theological creed as well, the
necessity of breaking the fact to them, of wounding their affection for
him, of disappointing the fond and cherished hope with which for years
his uncle had spent money upon his education--the ordeal which he had
to face was a fiery one.

When, in deepest sorrow, and with all the delicacy of his sensitive
nature, he told the bishop of his changed mental attitude toward the
problem of religion, it seemed to him that in his uncle's reception of
it the spirit of the Spanish Inquisitors was revived, so mad appeared
to him his horror of this heresy and his conviction that he, Walter,
was a poison in the moral atmosphere, which must be exterminated at any
cost.

In this interview between them, the bishop stood revealed to him in a
new character, and yet Walter seemed to realize that in his deeper
consciousness he had always known him for what he really was, though
all the circumstances of his conventional life had conduced to hide his
real self. He saw, now, how the submissiveness of his own dreamy
boyhood had never called into active force his guardian's native love
of domineering; his intolerance of opposition; the pride of his
exacting will. But on the first provocation of circumstances, these
traits stood boldly forth.

"Is it for this that I have spent my time and money upon you--to bring
up an INFIDEL?" Bishop Fairchilds demanded, when he had in part
recovered from the first shock of amazement the news had given him.

"I am not an infidel even if I have outgrown High Church dogmas. I have
a Faith--I have a Religion; and I assure you that I never so fully
realized the vital truth of my religion as I do now--now that I see
things, not in the dim cathedral light, but out under the broad
heavens!"

"How can you dare to question the authority of our Holy Mother, the
Church, whose teachings have come down to us through all these
centuries, bearing the sacred sanction of the most ancient authority?"

"Old things can rot!" Walter answered.

"And you fancy," the bishop indignantly demanded, "that I will give one
dollar for your support while you are adhering to this blasphemy? That
I will ever again even so much as break bread with you, until, in
humble contrition, you return to your allegiance to the Church?"

Walter lifted his earnest eyes and met squarely his uncle's frowning
stare. Then the boy rose.

"Nothing, then, is left for me," he said steadily, "but to leave your
home, give up the course of study I had hoped to continue at Harvard,
and get to work."

"You fully realize all that this step must mean?" his uncle coldly
asked him. "You are absolutely penniless."

"In a matter of this kind, uncle, you must realize that such a
consideration could not possibly enter in."

"You have not a penny of your own. The few thousands that your father
left were long ago used up in your school-bills."

"And I am much in your debt; I know it all."

"So you choose poverty and hardship for the sake of this perversity?"

"Others have suffered harder things for principle."

Thus they parted.

And thus it was, through the suddenness and unexpectedness of the loss
of his home and livelihood, that Walter Fairchilds came to apply for
the position at William Penn.

"HERE, Tillie, you take and go up to Sister Jennie Hershey's and get
some mush. I'm makin' fried mush fur supper," said Aunty Em, bustling
into the hotel kitchen where her niece was paring potatoes, one
Saturday afternoon. "Here's a quarter. Get two pound."

"Oh, Tillie," called her cousin Rebecca from the adjoining dining-room,
which served also as the family sitting-room, "hurry on and you'll
mebbe be in time to see the stage come in with the new teacher in.
Mebbe you'll see him to speak to yet up at Hershey's."

"Lizzie Hershey's that wonderful tickled that the teacher's going to
board at their place!" said Amanda, the second daughter, a girl of
Tillie's age, as she stood in the kitchen doorway and watched Tillie
put on her black hood over the white Mennonite cap. Stout Aunty Em also
wore the Mennonite dress, which lent a certain dignity to her round
face with its alert but kindly eyes; but her two daughters were still
"of the world's people."

"When Lizzie she tole me about it, comin' out from Lancaster after
market this morning," continued Amanda, "she was now that tickled! She
sayed he's such a good-looker! Och, I wisht he was stoppin' here;
ain't, Tillie? Lizzie'll think herself much, havin' a town fellah
stoppin' at their place."

"If he's stoppin' at Hershey's," said Rebecca, appearing suddenly,
"that ain't sayin' he has to get in with Lizzie so wonderful thick! I
hope he's a JOLLY fellah."

Amanda and Rebecca were now girls of seventeen and eighteen
years--buxom, rosy, absolutely unideal country lasses. Beside them,
frail little Tillie seemed a creature of another clay.

"Lizzie tole me: she sayed how he come up to their market-stall in
there at Lancaster this morning," Amanda related, "and tole her he'd
heard Jonas Hershey's pork-stall at market was where he could mebbe
find out a place he could board at in New Canaan with a private
family--he'd sooner live with a private family that way than at the
HOtel. Well, Lizzie she coaxed her pop right there in front of the
teacher to say THEY'd take him, and Jonas Hershey he sayed HE didn't
care any. So Lizzie she tole him then he could come to their place, and
he sayed he'd be out this after in the four-o'clock stage."

"Well, and I wonder what her mother has to say to her and Jonas fixin'
it up between 'em to take a boarder and not waitin' to ast HER!" Aunty
Em said. "I guess mebbe Sister Jennie's spited!"

The appellation of "sister" indicated no other relation than that of
the Mennonite church membership, Mrs. Jonas Hershey being also a New
Mennonite.

"Now don't think you have to run all the way there and back, Tillie,"
was her aunt's parting injunction. "_I_ don't time you like what your
pop does! Well, I guess not! I take notice you're always out of breath
when you come back from an urrand. It's early yet--you dare stop awhile
and talk to Lizzie."

Tillie gave her aunt a look of grateful affection as she left the
house. Often when she longed to thank her for her many little acts of
kindness, the words would not come. It was the habit of her life to
repress every emotion of her mind, whether of bitterness or pleasure,
and an unconquerable shyness seized upon her in any least attempt to
reveal herself to those who were good to her.

It was four o'clock on a beautiful October afternoon as she walked up
the village street, and while she enjoyed, through all her sensitive
maiden soul, the sweet sunshine and soft autumn coloring, her thought
dwelt with a pleasant expectancy on her almost inevitable meeting with
"the Teacher," if he did indeed arrive in the stage now due at New
Canaan.

Unlike her cousins Amanda and Rebecca, and their neighbor Lizzie
Hershey, Tillie's eagerness to meet the young man was not born of a
feminine hunger for romance. Life as yet had not revealed those
emotions to her except as she had known them in her love for Miss
Margaret--which love was indeed full of a sacred sentiment. It was only
because the teacher meant an aid to the realization of her ambition to
become "educated" that she was interested in his coming.

It was but a few minutes' walk to the home of Jonas Hershey, the
country pork butcher. As Tillie turned in at the gate, she heard, with
a leap of her heart, the distant rumble of the approaching stagecoach.

Jonas Hershey's home was probably the cleanest, neatest-looking red
brick house in all the county. The board-walk from the gate to the door
fairly glistened from the effects of soap and water. The flower-beds,
almost painfully neat and free from weeds, were laid out on a strictly
mathematical plan. A border of whitewashed clam-shells, laid side by
side with military precision, set off the brilliant reds and yellows of
the flowers, and a glance at them was like gazing into the face of the
midday sun. Tillie shaded her dazzled eyes as she walked across the
garden to the side door which opened into the kitchen. It stood open
and she stepped in without ceremony. For a moment she could see nothing
but red and yellow flowers and whitewashed clam-shells. But as her
vision cleared, she perceived her neighbor, Lizzie Hershey, a
well-built, healthy-looking country lass of eighteen years, cutting
bread at a table, and her mother, a large fat woman wearing the
Mennonite dress, standing before a huge kitchen range, stirring
"ponhaus" in a caldron.

The immaculate neatness of the large kitchen gave evidence, as did
garden, board-walk, and front porch, of that morbid passion for
"cleaning up" characteristic of the Dutch housewife.

Jonas Hershey did a very large and lucrative business, and the work of
his establishment was heavy. But he hired no "help" and his wife and
daughter worked early and late to aid him in earning the dollars which
he hoarded.

"Sister Jennie!" Tillie accosted Mrs. Hershey with the New Mennonite
formal greeting, "I wish you the grace and peace of the Lord."

"The same to you, sister," Mrs. Hershey replied, bending to receive
Tillie's kiss as the girl came up to her at the stove--the Mennonite
interpretation of the command, "Salute the brethren with a holy kiss."

"Well, Lizzie," was Tillie's only greeting to the girl at the table.
Lizzie was not a member of meeting and the rules forbade the members to
kiss those who were still in the world.

"Well, Tillie," answered Lizzie, not looking up from the bread she was
cutting.

Tillie instantly perceived a lack of cordiality. Something was wrong.
Lizzie's face was sullen and her mother's countenance looked grim and
determined. Tillie wondered whether their evident ill-humor were in any
way connected with herself, or whether her Aunty Em's surmise were
correct, and Sister Jennie was really "spited."

"I've come to get two pound of mush," she said, remembering her errand.

"It's all," Mrs. Hershey returned. "We solt every cake at market, and
no more's made yet. It was all a'ready till market was only half over."

"Aunty Em'll be disappointed. She thought she'd make fried mush for
supper," said Tillie.

"Have you strangers?" inquired Mrs. Hershey.

"No, we haven't anybody for supper, unless some come on the stage this
after. We had four for dinner."

"Were they such agents, or what?" asked Lizzie.

Tillie turned to her. "Whether they were agents? No, they were just
pleasure-seekers. They were out for a drive and stopped off to eat."

At this instant the rattling old stage-coach drew up at the gate.

The mother and daughter, paying no heed whatever to the sound, went on
with their work, Mrs. Hershey looking a shade more grimly determined as
she stirred her ponhaus and Lizzie more sulky.

Tillie had just time to wonder whether she had better slip out before
the stranger came in, when a knock on the open kitchen door checked her.

Neither mother nor daughter glanced up in answer to the knock. Mrs.
Hershey resolutely kept her eyes on her caldron as she turned her big
spoon about in it, and Lizzie, with sullen, averted face, industriously
cut her loaf.

A second knock, followed by the appearance of a good-looking,
well-dressed young man on the threshold, met with the same reception.
Tillie, in the background, and hidden by the stove, looked on
wonderingly.

The young man glanced, in evident mystification, at the woman by the
stove and at the girl at the table, and a third time rapped loudly.

"Good afternoon!" he said pleasantly, an inquiring note in his voice.

Mrs. Hershey and Lizzie went on with their work as though they had not
heard him.

He took a step into the room, removing his hat. "You were expecting me
this afternoon, weren't you?" he asked.

"This is the place," Lizzie remarked at last.

"You were looking for me?" he repeated.

Mrs. Hershey suddenly turned upon Lizzie. "Why don't you speak?" she
inquired half-tauntingly. "You spoke BEFORE."

Tillie realized that Sister Jennie must be referring to Lizzie's
readiness at market that morning to "speak," in making her agreement
with the young man for board.

"You spoke this morning," the mother repeated. "Why can't you speak
now?"

"Och, why don't you speak yourself?" retorted Lizzie. "It ain't fur ME
to speak!"

The stranger appeared to recognize that he was the subject of a
domestic unpleasantness.

"You find it inconvenient to take me to board?" he hesitatingly
inquired of Mrs. Hershey. "I shouldn't think of wishing to intrude.
There is a hotel in the place, I suppose?"

"Yes. There IS a HOtel in New Canaan."

"I can get board there, no doubt?"

"Well," Mrs. Hershey replied argumentatively, "that's a public house
and this ain't. We never made no practice of takin' boarders. To be
sure, Jonas he always was FUR boarders. But I AIN'T fur!"

"Oh, yes," gravely nodded the young man. "Yes. I see."

He picked up the dress-suit case which he had set on the sill. "Where
is the hotel, may I ask?"

"Just up the road a piece. You can see the sign out," said Mrs.
Hershey, while Lizzie banged the bread-box shut with an energy forcibly
expressive of her feelings.

"Thank you," responded the gentleman, a pair of keen, bright eyes
sweeping Lizzie's gloomy face.

He bowed, put his hat on his head and stepped out of the house.

There was a back door at the other side of the kitchen. Not stopping
for the ceremony of leave-taking, Tillie slipped out of it to hurry
home before the stranger should reach the hotel.

Her heart beat fast as she hurried across fields by a short-cut, and
there was a sparkle of excitement in her eyes. Her ears were tingling
with sounds to which they were unaccustomed, and which thrilled them
exquisitely--the speech, accent, and tones of one who belonged to that
world unknown to her except through books--out of which Miss Margaret
had come and to which this new teacher, she at once recognized,
belonged. Undoubtedly he was what was called, by magazine-writers and
novel-writers, a "gentleman." And it was suddenly revealed to Tillie
that in real life the phenomenon thus named was even more interesting
than in literature. The clean cut of the young man's thin face, his
pale forehead, the fineness of the white hand he had lifted to his hat,
his modulated voice and speech, all these things had, in her few
minutes' observation of him, impressed themselves instantly and deeply
upon the girl's fresh imagination.

Out of breath from her hurried walk, she reached the back door of the
hotel several minutes before the teacher's arrival. She had just time
to report to her aunt that Sister Jennie's mush was "all," and to reply
in the affirmative to the eager questions of Amanda and Rebecca as to
whether she had seen the teacher, when the sound of the knocker on the
front door arrested their further catechism.

"The stage didn't leave out whoever it is--it drove right apast," said
Aunty Em. "You go, Tillie, and see oncet who is it."

Tillie was sure that she had not been seen by the evicted applicant for
board, as she had been hidden behind the stove. This impression was
confirmed when she now opened the door to him, for there was no
recognition in his eyes as he lifted his hat. It was the first time in
Tillie's life that a man had taken off his hat to her, and it almost
palsied her tongue as she tried to ask him to come in.

In reply to his inquiry as to whether he could get board here, she led
him into the darkened parlor at the right of a long hall. Groping her
way across the floor to the window she drew up the blind.

"Just sit down," she said timidly. "I'll call Aunty Em."

"Thank you," he bowed with a little air of ceremony that for an instant
held her spellbound. She stood staring at him--only recalled to herself
and to a sense of shame for her rudeness by the sudden entrance of her
aunt.

"How d' do?" said Mrs. Wackernagel in her brisk, businesslike tone.
"D'you want supper?"

"I am the applicant for the New Canaan school. I want to get board for
the winter here, if I can--and in case I'm elected."

"Well, I say! Tillie! D'you hear that? Why us we all heard you was
goin' to Jonas Hershey's."

"They decided it wasn't convenient to take me and sent me here."

"Now think! If that wasn't like Sister Jennie yet! All right!" she
announced conclusively. "We can accommodate you to satisfaction, I
guess."

"Have you any other boarders?" the young man inquired.

"No reg'lar boarders--except, to be sure, the Doc; and he's lived with
us it's comin' fifteen years, I think, or how long, till November
a'ready. It's just our own fam'ly here and my niece where helps with
the work, and the Doc. We have a many to meals though, just passing
through that way, you know. We don't often have more 'n one reg'lar
boarder at oncet, so we just make 'em at home still, like as if they
was one of us. Now YOU," she hospitably concluded, "we'll lay in our
best bed. We don't lay 'em in the best bed unless they're some
clean-lookin'."

Tillie noticed as her aunt talked that while the young man listened
with evident interest, his eyes moved about the room, taking in every
detail of it. To Tillie's mind, this hotel parlor was so "pleasing to
the eye" as to constitute one of those Temptations of the Enemy against
which her New Mennonite faith prescribed most rigid discipline. She
wondered whether the stranger did not think it very handsome.

The arrangement of the room was evidently, like Jonas Hershey's
flower-beds, the work of a mathematical genius. The chairs all stood
with their stiff backs squarely against the wall, the same number
facing each other from the four sides of the apartment. Photographs in
narrow oval frames, six or eight, formed another oval, all equidistant
from the largest, which occupied the dead center, not only of this
group, but of the wall from which it depended. The books on the square
oak table, which stood in the exact middle of the floor, were arranged
in cubical piles in the same rigid order. Tillie saw the new teacher's
glance sweep their titles: "Touching Incidents, and Remarkable Answers
to Prayer"; "From Tannery to White House"; "Gems of Religious Thought,"
by Talmage; "History of the Galveston Horror; Illustrated"; "Platform
Echoes, or Living Truths for Heart and Head," by John B. Gough.

"Lemme see--your name's Fairchilds, ain't?" the landlady abruptly asked.

"Yes," bowed the young man.

"Will you, now, take it all right if I call you by your Christian name?
Us Mennonites daresent call folks Mr. and Mrs. because us we don't
favor titles. What's your first name now?"

Mr. Fairchilds considered the question with the appearance of trying to
remember. "You'd better call me Pestalozzi," he answered, with a look
and tone of solemnity.

"Pesky Louzy!" Mrs. Waekernagel exclaimed. "Well, now think! That's a
name where ain't familiar 'round here. Is it after some of your folks?"

"It was a name I think I bore in a previous incarnation as a teacher of
youth," Fairchilds gravely replied.

Mrs. Waekernagel looked blank. "Tillie!" she appealed to her niece, who
had shyly stepped half behind her, "do you know right what he means?"

Tillie dumbly shook her head.

"Pesky Louzy!" Mrs. Waekernagel experimented with the unfamiliar name.
"Don't it, now, beat all! It'll take me awhile till I'm used to that
a'ready. Mebbe I'll just call you Teacher; ain't?"

She looked at him inquiringly, expecting an answer. "Ain't!" she
repeated in her vigorous, whole-souled way.

"Eh--ain't WHAT?" Fairchilds asked, puzzled.

"Och, I just mean, SAY NOT? Can't you mebbe talk English wery good? We
had such a foreigners at this HOtel a'ready. We had oncet one, he was
from Phil'delphy and he didn't know what we meant right when we sayed,
'The butter's all any more.' He'd ast like you, 'All what?' Yes, he was
that dumm! Och, well," she added consolingly, "people can't help fur
their dispositions, that way!"

"And what must I call you?" the young man inquired.

"My name's Wackernagel."

"Miss or Mrs.?"

"Well, I guess not MISS anyhow! I'm the mother of four!"

"Oh, excuse me!"

"Oh, that's all right!" responded Mrs. Wackernagel, amiably. "Well, I
must go make supper now. You just make yourself at home that way."

"May I go to my room?"

"Now?" asked Mrs. Wackernagel, incredulously. "Before night?"

"To unpack my dress-suit case," the young man explained. "My trunk will
be brought out to-morrow on the stage."

"All right. If you want. But we ain't used to goin' up-stairs in the
daytime. Tillie, you take his satchel and show him up. This is my
niece, Tillie Getz."

Again Mr. Fairchilds bowed to the girl as his eyes rested on the fair
face looking out from her white cap. Tillie bent her head in response,
then stooped to pick up the suit case. But he interposed and took it
from her hands--and the touch of chivalry in the act went to her head
like wine.

She led the way up-stairs to the close, musty, best spare bedroom.




XV

THE WACKERNAGELS AT HOME


At the supper-table, the apparently inexhaustible topic of talk was the
refusal of the Hersheys to receive the new teacher into the bosom of
their family. A return to this theme again and again, on the part of
the various members of the Wackernagel household, did not seem to
lessen its interest for them, though the teacher himself did not take a
very animated part in its discussion. Tillie realized, as with an
absorbing interest she watched his fine face, that all he saw and heard
here was as novel to him as the world whence he had come would be to
her and her kindred and neighbors, could they be suddenly transplanted
into it. Tillie had never looked upon any human countenance which
seemed to express so much of that ideal world in which she lived her
real life.

"To turn him off after he got there!" Mrs. Wackernagel exclaimed,
reverting for the third time to the episode which had so excited the
family. "And after Lizzie and Jonas they'd sayed he could come yet!"

"Well, I say!" Mr. Wackernagel shook his head, as though the story,
even at its third recital, were full of surprises.

Mr. Wackernagel was a tall, raw-boned man with conspicuously large feet
and hands. He wore his hair plastered back from his face in a unique,
not to say distinguished style, which he privately considered highly
becoming his position as the proprietor of the New Canaan Hotel. Mr.
Wackernagel's self-satisfaction did indeed cover every detail of his
life--from the elegant fashion of his hair to the quality of the whisky
which he sold over the bar, and of which he never tired of boasting.
Not only was he entirely pleased with himself, but his good-natured
satisfaction included all his possessions--his horse first, then his
wife, his two daughters, his permanent boarder, "the Doc," and his
wife's niece Tillie. For people outside his own horizon, he had a
tolerant but contemptuous pity.

Mr. Wackernagel and the doctor both sat at table in their
shirt-sleeves, the proprietor wearing a clean white shirt (his
extravagance and vanity in using two white shirts a week being one of
the chief historical facts of the village), while the doctor was wont
to appear in a brown cotton shirt, the appearance of which suggested
the hostler rather than the physician.

That Fairchilds should "eat in his coat" placed him, in the eyes of the
Wackernagels, on the high social plane of the drummers from the city,
many of whom yearly visited the town with their wares.

"And Teacher he didn't press 'em none, up at Jonas Hershey's, to take
him in, neither, he says," Mrs. Wackernagel pursued.

"He says?" repeated Mr. Wackernagel, inquiringly. "Well, that's like
what I was, too, when I was a young man," he boasted. "If I thought I
ain't wanted when I went to see a young lady--if she passed any
insinyations--she never wasn't worried with ME ag'in!"

"I guess Lizzie's spited that Teacher's stoppin' at our place," giggled
Rebecca, her pretty face rosy with pleasurable excitement in the turn
affairs had taken. She sat directly opposite Mr. Fairchilds, while
Amanda had the chair at his side.

Tillie could see that the young man's eyes rested occasionally upon the
handsome, womanly form of her very good-looking cousin Amanda. Men
always looked at Amanda a great deal, Tillie had often observed. The
fact had never before had any special significance for her.

"Are you from Lancaster, or wherever?" the doctor inquired of Mr.
Fairchilds.

"From Connecticut," he replied in a tone that indefinably, but
unmistakably checked further questioning.

"Now think! So fur off as that!"

"Yes, ain't!" exclaimed Mrs. Wackernagel. "It's a wonder a body'd

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