crotch of a high staked and ridered fence on the summit of a
little hill, and that spot was a little girl. She had on an old-
fashioned poke-bonnet of deep pink, her red dress was of old-
fashioned homespun, her stockings were of yarn, and her rough
shoes should have been on the feet of a boy. Had the vanished
forests and cane-brakes of the eighteenth century covered the
land, had the wild beasts and wild men come back to roam them, had
the little girl's home been a stockade on the edge of the
wilderness, she would have fitted perfectly to the time and the
scene, as a little daughter of Daniel Boone. As it was, she felt
no less foreign than she looked, for the strangeness of the land
and of the people still possessed her so that her native shyness
had sunk to depths that were painful. She had a new ordeal before
her now, for in her sinewy little hands were a paper bag, a first
reader, and a spelling-book, and she was on her way to school.
Beneath her the white turnpike wound around the hill and down into
a little hollow, and on the crest of the next low hill was a
little frame house with a belfry on top. Even while she sat there
with parted lips, her face in a tense dream and her eyes dark with
dread and indecision, the bell from the little school-house
clanged through the still air with a sudden, sharp summons that
was so peremptory and personal that she was almost startled from
her perch. Not daring to loiter any longer, she leaped lightly to
the ground and started in breathless haste up and over the hill.
As she went down it, she could see horses hitched to the fence
around the yard and school-children crowding upon the porch and
filing into the door. The last one had gone in before she reached
the school-house gate, and she stopped with a thumping heart that
quite failed her then and there, for she retreated backward
through the gate, to be sure that no one saw her, crept along the