acquaintance.

During the holidays Mrs. Dayton wrote that one of the High-School
teachers had resigned and Mr. Warfield had gained the appointment, being
much delighted with it, and would board with her. From home she heard
that Jenny had a little son and they were all very joyous. Fan was going
to spend the winter with her. Aurelia had been taken out of school as
she didn't learn anything worth while, and Aunt Jane believed in making
her girls useful.

"I don't wonder teachers get discouraged in a small country place," she
thought, "when the parents care so little for education." She was glad
Mr. Warfield had gone to the High School, where he could have a more
congenial atmosphere.

Helen often wondered in these days what her father had been like, and
how he came to drift to such a dull place as Hope Center. Twenty years
before it had been a center of several things. The Church was
flourishing. In the winter the large boys and girls came to school and
the old-fashioned alligation, mensuration, and surveying were taught and
made useful, the history of the country, parsing out of Milton's
Paradise Lost, learning as much about the older English essayists and
writers as was taught in the High School.

Now, the children, before they were fairly grown, went into shops or
learned a trade. There had been a fine debating society in the Center,
and people drove in from miles around to listen to the arguments, which
were generally on stirring questions of the day, psychological fads
being unknown, or the highest truth in them called by some other name.

Then the railroad had really cut it off. North Hope had grown at its
expense.

She thought, too, not a little about her own future. What would happen
at the close of the school year. At the first of January she and Daisy
Bell and a Miss Gardiner went into Senior B. In another year she would
graduate.

There was something in Mrs. Van Dorn's letters that appealed to her
deeply at times, an interest that gave her a curious thrill. She wrote
more earnestly herself, she realized what a great thing this had been to
her, lifting her out of the common groove and giving her a decided
standing among Hope people. And, oh! it had afforded her such splendid
experiences with cultured people, some friends who might go a long way
through life with her and enrich her path with their life.

"If you were going to college, I should want to go too," Daisy Bell said
one day. "Papa would be d