s settled then. Now, fur your gettin' your letters,
still, from Teacher. How are we goin' to work that there? I'll tell
you, Tillie!" he slapped the table as an idea came to him. "You write
her off a letter and tell her she must write her letters to you in a
envelop directed to ME. And I'll see as you get 'em all right, you bet!
Ain't?"

"Oh, Doc!" Tillie was affectionately grateful. "You are so kind to me!
What would I do without you?" Tears choked her voice, filled her eyes,
and rolled down her face.

"Och, that's all right," he patted her shoulder. "Ain't no better fun
goin' fur me than gettin' ahead of that mean old Jake Getz!" Tillie
drew back a bit shocked; but she did not protest.

Carrying in her bosom a stamped envelop, a sheet of paper and a pencil,
the child walked home in a very different frame of mind from that in
which she had started out. She shuddered as she remembered how wickedly
rebellious had been her mood that morning. Never before had such hot
and dreadful feelings and thoughts burned in her heart and brain. In an
undefined way, the growing girl realized that such a state of mind and
heart was unworthy her sacred friendship with Miss Margaret.

"I want to be like her--and she was never ugly in her feelings like
what I was all morning!"

When she reached home, she so effectually made up for lost time in the
vigor with which she attacked the Saturday cleaning that Mrs. Getz,
with unusual forbearance, decided not to tell her father of her
insubordination.

Tillie wrote her first letter to Miss Margaret, ty stealth, at midnight.

X

ADAM SCHUNK'S FUNERAL

A crucial struggle with her father, to which both Tillie and Miss
Margaret had fearfully looked forward, came about much sooner than
Tillie had anticipated. The occasion of it, too, was not at all what
she had expected and even planned it to be.

It was her conversion, just a year after she had been taken out of
school, to the ascetic faith of the New Mennonites that precipitated
the crisis, this conversion being wrought by a sermon which she heard
at the funeral of a neighboring farmer.

A funeral among the farmers of Lancaster County is a festive occasion,
the most popular form of dissipation known, bringing the whole
population forth as in some regions they turn out to a circus.

Adam Schank's death, having been caused by his own hand in a fit of
despair over the loss of some money he had unsuccessfully invested, was
so sudd