am a professor of religion, don't you?"

"Why, to be sure!"

"Oh!"

"And you better have your answer ready."

"What, in your judgment, may I ask, would be a suitable answer to that?"

"Well, ARE you a perfessor?"

"Oh, I'm anything at all that will get me this 'job.' I've got to have
it as a makeshift until I can get hold of something better. Let me
see--will a Baptist do?"

"Are you a Baptist?" the girl stolidly asked.

"When circumstances are pressing. Will they be satisfied with a
Baptist?"

"That's one of the fashionable churches of the world," Amanda replied
gravely. "And the directors is most all Mennonites and Amish and
Dunkards. All them is PLAIN churches and loosed of the world, you know."

"Oh, well, I'll wriggle out somehow! Trust to luck!" Fairchilds
dismissed the subject, realizing the injudiciousness of being too
confidential with this girl on so short an acquaintance.

At the momentous hour of seven, the directors promptly assembled. When
Tillie, at her aunt's request, carried two kerosene lamps into the
parlor, a sudden determination came to the girl to remain and witness
the reception of the new teacher by the School Board.

She was almost sick with apprehension lest the Board should realize, as
she did, that this Harvard graduate was too fine for such as they. It
was an austere Board, hard to satisfy, and there was nothing they would
so quickly resent and reject as evident superiority in an applicant.
The Normal School students, their usual candidates, were for the most
part, though not always, what was called in the neighborhood "nice and
common." The New Canaan Board was certainly not accustomed to sitting
in judgment upon an applicant such as this Pestalozzi Fairchilds.
(Tillie's religion forbade her to call him by the vain and worldly form
of Mr.)

No one noticed the pale-faced girl as, after placing one lamp on the
marble-topped table about which the directors sat and another on the
mantelpiece, she moved quietly away to the farthest corner of the long,
narrow parlor and seated herself back of the stove.

The applicant, too, when he came into the room, was too much taken up
with what he realized to be the perils of his case to observe the
little watcher in the corner, though he walked past her so close that
his coat brushed her shoulder, sending along her nerves, like a faint
electric shock, a sensation so novel and so exquisite that it made her
suddenly close her eyes to stead