ckly toward the house, though she
know it would be of no use to come quickly. Let her come quickly, or let
her come slowly, the rebuke was sure to greet her all the name.

"Why don't you come when you're called, _I'd_ like to know! You're never
in reach when you're wanted, and you're good for nothing when you
are here!"

Julia Anderson's earliest lesson from her mother's lips had been that
she was good for nothing. And every day and almost every hour since had
brought her repeated assurances that she was good for nothing. If she
had not been good for a great deal, she would long since have been good
for nothing as the result of such teaching. But though this was not the
first, nor the thousandth, nor the ten thousandth time that she had
been told that she was good for nothing, the accustomed insult seemed to
sting her now more than ever. Was it that, being almost eighteen, she
was beginning to feel the woman blossoming in her nature? Or, was it
that the tender words of August Wehle had made her sure that she was
good for something, that now her heart felt her mother's insult to be a
stale, selfish, ill-natured lie?

"Take this cup of tea over to Mrs. Malcolm's, and tell her that it a'n't
quite as good as what I borried of her last week. And tell her that
they'll be a new-fangled preacher at the school-house a Sunday, a
Millerite or somethin', a preachin' about the end of the world."

Julia did not say "Yes, ma'am," in her usually meek style. She smarted a
little yet from the harsh words, and so went away in silence.

Why did she walk fast? Had she noticed that August Wehle, who was
"breaking up" her father's north field, was just plowing down the west
side of his land? If she hastened, she might reach the cross-fence as he
came round to it, and while he was yet hidden from the sight of the
house by the turn of the hill. And would not a few words from August
Wehle be pleasant to her ears after her mother's sharp depreciation? It
is at least safe to conjecture that some such feeling made her hurry
through the long, waving timothy of the meadow, and made her cross the
log that spanned the brook without ever so much as stopping to look at
the minnows glancing about in the water flecked with the sunlight that
struggled through the boughs of the water-willows. For, in her thorough
loneliness, Julia Anderson had come to love the birds, the squirrels,
and the fishes as companions, and in all her life she had never before
c