all the fu'ther I got."

Miss Margaret looked at him for an instant, then suddenly lifted the
lid of her desk, evidently to search for something. When she closed it
her face was quite grave.

"We'll have the reading-lesson now," she announced.

Tillie tried to withdraw her attention from the teacher and fix it on
her own work, but the gay, glad tone in which Lizzie Harnish was
reading the lines,

"When thoughts
Of the last bitter hour come like a blight
Over thy spirit--"

hopelessly checked the flow of her ideas.

This class was large, and by the time Absalom's turn to read was
reached, "Thanatopsis" had been finished, and so the first stanza of
"The Bells" fell to him. It had transpired in the reading of
"Thanatopsis" that a grave and solemn tone best suited that poem, and
the value of this intelligence was made manifest when, in a voice of
preternatural solemnity, he read:

"What a world of merriment their melody foretells!"

Instantly, when he had finished his "stanza," Lizzie raised her hand to
offer a criticism. "Absalom, he didn't put in no gestures."

Miss Margaret's predecessor had painstakingly trained his
reading-classes in the Art of Gesticulation in Public Speaking, and
Miss Margaret found the results of his labors so entertaining that she
had never been able to bring herself to suppress the monstrosity.

"I don't like them gestures," sulkily retorted Absalom.

"Never mind the gestures," Miss Margaret consoled him--which
indifference on her part seemed high treason to the well-trained class.

"I'll hear you read, now, the list of synonyms you found in these two
poems," she added. "Lizzie may read first."

While the class rapidly leafed their readers to find their lists of
synonyms, Miss Margaret looked up and spoke to Tillie, reminding her
gently that that composition would not be written by half-past three if
she did not hasten her work.

Tillie blushed with embarrassment at being caught in an idleness that
had to be reproved, and resolutely bent all her powers to her task.

She looked about the room for a subject. The walls were adorned with
the print portraits of "great men,"--former State superintendents of
public instruction in Pennsylvania,--and with highly colored chromo
portraits of Washington, Lincoln, Grant, and Garfield. Then there were
a number of framed mottos: "Education rules in America," "Rely on
yourself," "God is our hope," "Dare to say No," "Knowledge is power