our cow has a calf and it is spotted. It is going
to be a good year for apples and hay so you and John will be
glad and we can pay a little more morgage. Miss Dearborn
asked us what is the object of edducation and I said the
object of mine was to help pay off the morgage. She told Aunt
M. and I had to sew extra for punishment because she says a
morgage is disgrace like stealing or smallpox and it will be
all over town that we have one on our farm. Emma Jane is not
morgaged nor Richard Carter nor Dr. Winship but the Simpsons
are.

Rise my soul, strain every nerve,
Thy morgage to remove,
Gain thy mother's heartfelt thanks
Thy family's grateful love.

Pronounce family QUICK or it won't sound right

Your loving little friend
Rebecca

Dear John,--You remember when we tide the new dog in the barn
how he bit the rope and howled I am just like him only the
brick house is the barn and I can not bite Aunt M. because I
must be grateful and edducation is going to be the making of
me and help you pay off the morgage when we grow up.
Your loving

Becky.

V

WISDOM'S WAYS

The day of Rebecca's arrival had been Friday, and on the Monday
following she began her education at the school which was in Riverboro
Centre, about a mile distant. Miss Sawyer borrowed a neighbor's horse
and wagon and drove her to the schoolhouse, interviewing the teacher,
Miss Dearborn, arranging for books, and generally starting the child on
the path that was to lead to boundless knowledge. Miss Dearborn, it may
be said in passing, had had no special preparation in the art of
teaching. It came to her naturally, so her family said, and perhaps for
this reason she, like Tom Tulliver's clergyman tutor, "set about it
with that uniformity of method and independence of circumstances which
distinguish the actions of animals understood to be under the immediate
teaching of Nature." You remember the beaver which a naturalist tells
us "busied himself as earnestly in constructing a dam in a room up
three pair of stairs in London as if he had been laying his foundation
in a lake in Upper Canada. It was his function to build, the absence of
water or of possible progeny was an accident for which he was not
accountable." In the same manner did Miss Dearborn lay what she fondly
imagined to be foundations in the infant mind.

Rebecca walked to school after th