house Mrs. Burch said that after I had experienced religion I
must learn music and train my voice and go out to heathen lands
and save souls, so I thought that would be my career. But we
girls tried to have a branch and be home missionaries and it did
not work well. Emma Jane's father would not let her have her
birthday party when he found out what she had done and Aunt Jane
sent me up to Jake Moody's to tell him we did not mean to be rude
when we asked him to go to meeting more often. He said all right,
but just let him catch that little dough-faced Perkins young one
in his yard once more and she'd have reason to remember the call,
which was just as rude and impolite as our trying to lead him to
a purer and a better life.

Then Uncle Jerry and Mr. Aladdin and Miss Dearborn liked my
compositions, and I thought I'd better be a writer, for I must be
something the minute I'm seventeen, or how shall we ever get the
mortgage off the farm? But even that hope is taken away from me
now, for Uncle Jerry made fun of my story Lancelot Or The Parted
Lovers and I have decided to be a teacher like Miss Dearborn.

The pathetic announcement of a change in the career and life
purposes of Rebecca was brought about by her reading the grown-up
story to Mr. and Mrs. Jeremiah Cobb after supper in the orchard.
Uncle Jerry was the person who had maintained all along that
Riverboro people would not make a story; and Lancelot or The
Parted Lovers was intended to refute that assertion at once and
forever; an assertion which Rebecca regarded (quite truly) as
untenable, though why she certainly never could have explained.
Unfortunately Lancelot was a poor missionary, quite unfitted for
the high achievements to which he was destined by the youthful