less we can contrive to pay off
that detestable mortgage. The day grows farther off instead of nearer
now that we haven't paid the interest this year."

She pulled a piece of paper towards her, and scribbling idly on it read
aloud in a moment or two:--

"Will you pay a little faster?" said the mortgage to the farm;
"I confess I'm very tired of this place."
"The weariness is mutual," Rebecca Randall cried;
"I would I'd never gazed upon your face!"

"A note has a 'face,'" observed Emma Jane, who was gifted in
arithmetic. "I didn't know that a mortgage had."

"Our mortgage has," said Rebecca revengefully. "I should know him if I
met him in the dark. Wait and I'll draw him for you. It will be good
for you to know how he looks, and then when you have a husband and
seven children, you won't allow him to come anywhere within a mile of
your farm."

The sketch when completed was of a sort to be shunned by a timid person
on the verge of slumber. There was a tiny house on the right, and a
weeping family gathered in front of it. The mortgage was depicted as a
cross between a fiend and an ogre, and held an axe uplifted in his red
right hand. A figure with streaming black locks was staying the blow,
and this, Rebecca explained complacently, was intended as a likeness of
herself, though she was rather vague as to the method she should use in
attaining her end.

"He's terrible," said Emma Jane, "but awfully wizened and small."

"It's only a twelve hundred dollar mortgage," said Rebecca, "and that's
called a small one. John saw a man once that was mortgaged for twelve
thousand."

"Shall you be a writer or an editor?" asked Emma Jane presently, as if
one had only to choose and the thing were done.

"I shall have to do what turns up first, I suppose."

"Why not go out as a missionary to Syria, as the Burches are always
coaxing you to? The Board would pay your expenses."

"I can't make up my mind to be a missionary," Rebecca answered. "I'm
not good enough in the first place, and I don't 'feel a call,' as Mr.
Burch says you must. I would like to do something for somebody and make
things move, somewhere, but I don't want to go thousands of miles away
teaching people how to live when I haven't learned myself. It isn't as
if the heathen really needed me; I'm sure they'll come out all right in
the end."

"I can't see how; if all the people who ought to go out to save them
stay at home as we do," argued Emma Jan