in tone or culture. Mr.
Holmes was an elocutionist and had taken great pains with Hollis Rheid's
voice. There was a courteous gentleness in his manner all his own; if
knighthood meant purity, goodness, truth and manliness, then Hollis Rheid
was a knightly school-boy. The youngest of five rough boys, with a stern,
narrow-minded father and a mother who loved her boys with all her heart
and yet for herself had no aims beyond kitchen and dairy, he had not
learned his refinement at home; I think he had not _learned_ it anywhere.
Marjorie's mother insisted that Hollis Rheid must have had a praying
grandmother away back somewhere. The master had written to his friend,
Miss Prudence Pomeroy, that Hollis Rheid was a born gentleman, and had
added with more justice and penetration than he had shown in reading
Marjorie, "he has too little application and is too mischievous to become
a real student. But I am not looking for geniuses in a country school.
Marjorie and Hollis are bright enough for every purpose in life excepting
to become leaders."

"Are you going to church, to-night?" Hollis inquired as she seated
herself carefully on the sled.

"In the church?" she asked, bracing her feet and tucking the ends of her
shawl around them.

"Yes; an evangelist is going to preach."

"Evangelist!" repeated Marjorie in a voice with a thrill in it.

"Don't you know what that is?" asked Hollis, harnessing himself into the
sled.

"Oh, yes, indeed," said she. "I know about him and Christian."

Hollis looked perplexed; this must be one of Marjorie's queer ways of
expressing something, and the strange preacher certainly had something to
do with Christians.

"If it were not for the fractions I suppose I might go. I wish I wasn't
stupid about Arithmetic."

"It's no matter if girls are stupid," he said consolingly. "Are you sure
you are on tight? I'm going to run pretty soon. You won't have to earn
your living by making figures."

"Shall you?" she inquired with some anxiety.

"Of course, I shall. Haven't I been three times through the Arithmetic
and once through the Algebra that I may support myself and somebody else,
sometime?"

This seemed very grand to child Marjorie who found fractions a very
Slough of Despond.

"I'm going to the city as soon as Uncle Jack finds a place for me. I
expect a letter from him every night."

"Perhaps it will come to-night," said Marjorie, not very hopefully.

"I hope it will. And so this may be you