He will be so disappointed in me as time goes
on. And still he would think I have already climbed two rungs on the
ladder, although it is only a little Wareham ladder, for I am one of
the "Pilot" editors, the first "girl editor"--and I have taken a fifty
dollar prize in composition and paid off the interest on a twelve
hundred dollar mortgage with it.

"High is the rank we now possess,
But higher we shall rise;
Though what we shall hereafter be
Is hid from mortal eyes."

This hymn was sung in meeting the Sunday after my election, and Mr.
Aladdin was there that day and looked across the aisle and smiled at me.
Then he sent me a sheet of paper from Boston the next morning with just
one verse in the middle of it.

"She made the cleverest people quite ashamed; And ev'n the good with
inward envy groan, Finding themselves so very much exceeded, In their
own way by all the things that she did."

Miss Maxwell says it is Byron, and I wish I had thought of the last
rhyme before Byron did; my rhymes are always so common.

I am too busy doing, nowadays, to give very much thought to being.
Mr. Aladdin was teasing me one day about what he calls my "cast-off
careers."

"What makes you aim at any mark in particular, Rebecca?" he asked,
looking at Miss Maxwell and laughing. "Women never hit what they aim at,
anyway; but if they shut their eyes and shoot in the air they generally
find themselves in the bull's eye."

I think one reason that I have always dreamed of what I should be, when
I grew up, was, that even before father died mother worried about the
mortgage on the farm, and what would become of us if it were foreclosed.

It was hard on children to be brought up on a mortgage that way, but
oh! it was harder still on poor dear mother, who had seven of us then
to think of, and still has three at home to feed and clothe out of the
farm.

Aunt Jane says I am young for my age, Aunt Miranda is afraid that I will
never really "grow up," Mr. Aladdin says that I don't know the world any
better than the pearl inside of the oyster. They none of them know the
old, old thoughts I have, some of them going back years and years; for
they are never ones that I can speak about.

I remember how we children used to admire father, he was so handsome and
graceful and amusing, never cross like mother, or too busy to play with
us. He never did any work at home because he had to keep his hands nice
for playing the church