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I sew on brown gingham dresses every afternoon when Emma Jane and the Simpsons are playing house or running on the Logs when their mothers do not know it. Their mothers are afraid they will drown and aunt M. is afraid I will wet my clothes so will not let me either. I can play from half past four to supper and after supper a little bit and Saturday afternoons. I am glad our cow has a calf and it is spotted. It is going to be a good year for apples and hay so you and John will be glad and we can pay a little more morgage. Miss Dearborn asked us what is the object of edducation and I said the object of mine was to help pay off the morgage. She told Aunt M. and I had to sew extra for punishment because she says a morgage is disgrace like stealing or smallpox and it will be all over town that we have one on our farm. Emma Jane is not morgaged nor Richard Carter nor Dr. Winship but the Simpsons are.

Rise my soul, strain every nerve,
Thy morgage to remove,
Gain thy mother’s heartfelt thanks
Thy family’s grateful love.

Pronounce family quick or it won’t sound right.

Your loving little friend
REBECCA.

DEAR JOHN,–YOU remember when we tide the new dog in the barn how he bit the rope and howled. I am just like him only the brick house is the barn and I can not bite Aunt M. because I must be grateful and edducation is going to be the making of me and help you pay off the mortgage when we grow up.

Your loving
BECKY.

III. WISDOM’S WAYS

THE day of Rebecca’s arrival had been Friday, and on the Monday following she began her education at the school which was in Riverboro Centre, about a mile distant. Miss Sawyer borrowed a neighbor’s horse and wagon and drove her to the schoolhouse, interviewing the teacher, Miss Dearborn, arranging for books, and generally starting the child on the path that was to lead to boundless knowledge.

Rebecca walked to school after the first morning. She loved this part of the day’s programme. When the dew was not too heavy and the weather was fair there was a short cut through the woods. She turned off the main road, crept through Joshua Woodman’s bars, waved away Mrs. Carter’s cows, trod the short grass of the pasture, with its well-worn path running through gardens of buttercups and whiteweed, and groves of boxberry leaves and sweet fern. She descended a little hill, jumped from stone to stone across a woodland brook, startling the drowsy frogs, who were always winking and blinking in the morning sun. Then came the “woodsy bit,” with her feet pressing the slippery carpet of brown pine needles; the woodsy bit so full of dewy morning surprises,–fungous growths of brilliant orange and crimson springing up around the stumps of dead trees, beautiful things born in a single night; and now and then the miracle of a little clump of waxen Indian pipes, seen just quickly enough to be saved from her careless tread. Then she climbed a stile, went through a grassy meadow, slid under another pair of bars, and came out into the road again, having gained nearly half a mile.

How delicious it all was! Rebecca clasped her Quackenbos’s Grammar and Greenleaf’s Arithmetic with a joyful sense of knowing her lessons. Her dinner pail swung from her right hand, and she had a blissful consciousness of the two soda biscuits spread with butter and syrup, the baked cup-custard, the doughnut, and the square of hard gingerbread. Sometimes she said whatever “piece” she was going to speak on the next Friday afternoon.

“A soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers, There was lack of woman’s nursing, there was dearth of woman’s tears.”

How she loved the swing and the sentiment of it! How her young voice quivered whenever she came to the refrain:–