hildren talk!" she said.

Every day Rebecca appealed more and more, unconsciously, to what was most
generous and grave and heedful in my nature. She seemed to be demanding
of me, with mute, gentle importunity, to make real my ideal of life, to
be what I knew she believed me to be. Her faith in my superior wisdom and
goodness, her slow, timid way of confiding in me, with tears and blushes
even; it was all very flattering, very captivating to one who had but so
lately risen to occupy the pedestal of a moral instructress, and "my
child," "my dear child," I said to her in many private discourses, with
more than the tranquil grace and dignity with which such terms had been
applied to me, only a year before, by the august principal of Mt. B----
Seminary.

Rebecca read my books, and I drew her out to talk with me about them. She
prepared her lessons, with me, out of school. She knew that she might
come whenever she chose to my little room at the Ark, which the chimney
kept comfortably warm, and often I heard her footsteps on the stairs and
her gentle knock at the door.

If I was troubled or perplexed on any account, Rebecca always seemed to
understand in that quiet, unobtrusive way of hers, and followed my
movements with a grave, restful sympathy in her eyes. On several
occasions I had asked her, playfully, to walk up the lane with me after
school. So it became a matter of course that she should wait for me.
Often we took longer walks, for it was an "open winter," with only one
or two light falls of snow.

Then I believed the "Tempter" came to me, in the form of another
invitation to drive, from Mr. Rollin.

Occupied with my duties in the school-room, one afternoon, I was startled
to observe these characters as suddenly and mysteriously raised as if by
the unseen hand of a modern sibyl on the blackboard:--

"teecher's Bo is a setting On the Fens."

Involuntarily raising my eyes to the window, I was unable to discover on
the fence opposite anything of the nature indicated in those words. I
concluded that the whole was to be taken as one of those deeply
allegorical expressions in which the Wallencamp tongue abounded.

Shortly afterward, a boy who had been playing truant and the Jews' harp
at the same time, in a subdued and melancholy way under the window, and
who had, doubtless, been bribed to undertake his present commission
through some extraordinary means, entered the school-room, and laid on my
desk a note from the