ng, but resolute, her face heavily
veiled, she might have been seen on her way to Water Street in
Lexington--a street she had heard of all her life and had been careful
never to enter except to take or to alight from a train at the station.
Passing quickly along until she reached a certain ill-smelling little
stairway which opened on the foul sidewalk, she mounted it, knocked at
a low black-painted plank door, and entered a room which was a
curiosity shop. There she was greeted by an 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 the rack on
which she stretched every muscle of her mind. What did she know about
teaching? What kind of people would they be?

Late that mild September afternoon she began to find out The stage
stopped at the mouth of a lane; and looking out with deathly faintness,
Gabriella saw, standing beside a narrow, no-top buggy, a big, hearty,