cornfully to the breeze when they get
outside, but girls preserve carefully in an envelope.

Some rewards are great and glorious, for boys can get to be governor or
school trustee or road commissioner or president, while girls can only
be wife and mother. But all of us can have the ornament of a meek and
lowly spirit, especially girls, who have more use for it than boys.

R.R.R.

* * * * *

STORIES AND PEOPLE

October, 187--

There are people in books and people in Riverboro, and they are not the
same kind. They never talk of chargers and palfreys in the village, nor
say How oft and Methinks, and if a Scotchman out of Rob Roy should come
to Riverboro and want to marry one of us girls we could not understand
him unless he made motions; though Huldah Meserve says if a nobleman of
high degree should ask her to be his,--one of vast estates with serfs at
his bidding,--she would be able to guess his meaning in any language.

Uncle Jerry Cobb thinks that Riverboro people would not make a story,
but I know that some of them would.

Jack-o'-lantern, though only a baby, was just like a real story if
anybody had written a piece about him: How his mother was dead and his
father ran away and Emma Jane and I got Aunt Sarah Cobb to keep him so
Mr. Perkins wouldn't take him to the poor farm; and about our lovely
times with him that summer, and our dreadful loss when his father
remembered him in the fall and came to take him away; and how Aunt Sarah
carried the trundle bed up attic again and Emma Jane and I heard her
crying and stole away.

Mrs. Peter Meserve says Grandpa Sawyer was a wonderful hand at stories
before his spirit was broken by grandmother. She says he was the life
of the store and tavern when he was a young man, though generally sober,
and she thinks I take after him, because I like compositions better than
all the other lessons; but mother says I take after father, who always
could say everything nicely whether he had anything to say or not; so
methinks I should be grateful to both of them. They are what is called
ancestors and much depends upon whether you have them or not. The
Simpsons have not any at all. Aunt Miranda says the reason everybody
is so prosperous around here is because their ancestors were all first
settlers and raised on burnt ground. This should make us very proud.

Methinks and methought are splendid words for compositions. Miss
Dearborn likes them very much, but Alice and I never bring