f Art, Science,
and Useful Knowledge." Out of this he taught her about "mechanical powers"
and "animated nature" and astronomy and history and geography--almost
anything that came to his hand.

Up in our garret we have the very book he used, and modern research and
science have proved that there is scarcely a true word in it. But don't
waste any pity on Hannah for having such a mistaken teacher, for it is
likely enough, don't you think, that research and science a hundred years
from now will have proved that there is scarcely a word of truth in our
school-books of to-day? It really doesn't seem to matter much.

At any rate, those were the things of which Captain Winthrop talked to
Hannah in the mornings. In the afternoon, he went over to an apple-tree by
the edge of the witch garden, and there he found Ann Mary; and what he
talked to her about nobody knew but herself, although Master Necronsett
passed back and forth so often in his herb-gathering that it is likely he
may have caught something. It seems not improbable, from what happened
afterward, that the young man was telling the young girl things which did
not come out of a book, and which are consequently safe from science and
research, for they are certainly as true to-day as they were then.

Once, in her anxiety to have everything exactly right for her sister,
Hannah asked Master Necronsett about Captain Winthrop's being there so
much.

"Master Doctor, will not Captain Winthrop absorb, perchance, some of the
great virtue of the plant away from Ann Mary? Will he not hurt her cure?"

Grandmother never says so, but I have always imagined that even that
carven image of an old aborigine must, have smiled a little as he told
her:

"Nay, the young man will not hurt your sister's cure."

At the end of September, something tremendously exciting happened to
Hannah. She had been so busy learning the contents of that old calf-bound
book that she had never noticed how a light seemed to shine right through
Ann Mary's lovely face every time Captain Winthrop looked at her. The
little student was the most surprised girl in the world when the young
soldier told her, one morning in the granary, that he wanted her sister
to marry him, and that Ann Mary wanted it, too, if Hannah would allow it.

He laughed a little as he said this last, but he looked anxiously at her,
for Ann Mary, who was as sweet as she was pretty and useless, had felt it
to be a poor return for Hannah's dev