ennonite faltered
at this filial disobedience. She obeyed her father implicitly, however
tyrannical he was, to the point where he bade her suppress and kill all
the best that God had given her of mind and heart. Then she revolted;
and she never for an instant doubted her entire justification in
eluding or defying his authority.

There was another influence besides her books and Miss Margaret's
letters which, unconsciously to herself, was educating Tillie at this
time. Her growing fondness for stealing off to the woods not far from
the farm, of climbing to the hill-top beyond the creek, or walking over
the fields under the wide sky--not only in the spring and summer, but
at all times of the year--was yielding her a richness, a depth and
breadth, of experience that nothing else could have given her.

A nature deeply sensitive to the mysterious appeal of sky and green
earth, of deep, shady forest and glistening water, when unfolding in
daily touch with these things, will learn to see life with a broader,
saner mind and catch glimpses and vistas of truth with a clearer vision
than can ever come to one whose most susceptible years are spent walled
in and overtopped by the houses of the city that shut out and stifle
"the larger thought of God." And Tillie, in spite of her narrowing New
Mennonite "convictions," did reach through her growing love for and
intimacy with Nature a plane of thought and feeling which was
immeasurably above her perfunctory creed.

Sometimes the emotions excited by her solitary walks gave the young
girl greater pain than happiness--yet it was a pain she would not have
been spared, for she knew, though the knowledge was never formulated in
her thought, that in some precious, intimate way her suffering set her
apart and above the villagers and farming people about her--those whose
placid, contented eyes never strayed from the potato-patch to the
distant hills, or lifted themselves from the goodly tobacco-fields to
the wide blue heavens.

Thus, cramped and crushing as much of her life was, it had--as all
conditions must have--its compensations; and many of the very
circumstances which at the time seemed most unbearable brought forth in
later years rich fruit.

And so, living under her father's watchful eye and relentless
rule,--with long days of drudgery and outward acquiescence in his
scheme of life that she devote herself, mind, body, and soul, to the
service of himself, his wife, and their childr