elderly gentleman, who united in himself the offices of
superintendent of schools, experimental astronomer, and
manufacturer of a high grade of mustard. She had presented herself
to be examined for a teacher's certificate.

Fortunately for Gabriella this kindly old sage remembered well her
grandmother and her uncles: they had been connoisseurs; they had
for years bought liberally of his mustard. Her uncles had used it
first on their dinner tables as a condiment and afterward on their
foreheads and stomachs as a plaster. They had never failed to
praise it to his face--both for its power to draw an appetite and
for its power to withdraw an ache. In turn he now praised them and
asked the easiest questions. Gabriella, whose knowledge of
arithmetic was as a grain of mustard seed, and who spoke beautiful
English, but could not have parsed, "John, come here!"--received a
first-class certificate for the sake of the future and a box of
mustard in memory of the past.

Early in that autumn she climbed, one morning, into an old yellow-
red, ever muddied stage-coach (the same that David had ridden in)
and set out to a remote neighborhood, where, after many failures
otherwise, she had secured a position to teach a small country
school. She was glad that it was distant; she had a feeling that
the farther away it was from Lexington, the easier it would be to
teach.

Nearly all that interminable day, the mechanism of the stage and
the condition of the pike (much fresh-cracked limestone on it)
administered to Gabriella's body such a massage as is not now known
to medical science. But even this was as nothing in comparison to