think at
the same time, an' be happy!"

CHAPTER IX

JENNIE ARRANGES A CHRISTMAS PARTY

The great party magnates who made up the tickets from governor down to the
lowest county office, doubtless regarded the little political plum shaken
off into the apron of Miss Jennie Woodruff of the Woodruff District, as
the very smallest and least bloomy of all the plums on the tree; but there
is something which tends to puff one up in the mere fact of having
received the votes of the people for any office, especially in a region of
high average civilization, covering six hundred or seven hundred square
miles of good American domain. Jennie was a sensible country girl. Being
sensible, she tried to avoid uppishness. But she did feel some little
sense of increased importance as she drove her father's little
one-cylinder runabout over the smooth earth roads, in the crisp December
weather, just before Christmas.

The weather itself was stimulating, and she was making rapid progress in
the management of the little car which her father had offered to lend her
for use in visiting the one hundred or more rural schools soon to come
under her supervision. She rather fancied the picture of herself, clothed
in more or less authority and queening it over her little army of
teachers.

Mr. Haakon Peterson was phlegmatically conscious that she made rather an
agreeable picture, as she stopped her car alongside his top buggy to talk
with him. She had bright blue eyes, fluffy brown hair, a complexion
whipped pink by the breeze, and she smiled at him ingratiatingly.

"Don't you think father is lovely?" said she. "He is going to let me use
the runabout when I visit the schools."

"That will be good," said Haakon. "It will save you lots of time. I hope
you make the county pay for the gasoline."

"I haven't thought about that," said Jennie. "Everybody's been so nice to
me--I want to give as well as receive."

"Why," said Haakon, "you will yust begin to receive when your salary
begins in Yanuary."

"Oh, no!" said Jennie. "I've received much more than that now! You don't
know how proud I feel. So many nice men I never knew before, and all my
old friends like you working for me in the convention and at the polls,
just as if I amounted to something."

"And you don't know how proud I feel," said Haakon, "to have in county
office a little girl I used to hold on my lap."

In early times, when Haakon was a flat-capped immigrant boy, he had e