es that keep much of
the charm she had in those days imprisoned from our eyes to-day. So the
picture alone is of no great service. Nor will the clipping tell much.
It only records:

"Miss Margaret Mueller, daughter of the late Herman Mueller of
Spring Township, this county, will teach school in District 18,
the Adams District in Prospect Township, this fall and winter.
She will board with the family of ye editor."

Now the reader must know that Margaret Mueller's eyes had been turned to
Harvey as to a magnet for three years. She had chosen the Adams district
school in Prospect Township, because the Adams district school was
nearer than any other school district to Harvey; she had gone to the
Adamses to board because the little bleak house near the Wahoo was the
nearest house in the district to Harvey and to a social circle which she
desired to enter--the best that Harvey offered.

She saw Grant, a rough, ruddy, hardy lad, of her own time of life,
moving in the very center of the society she cherished in her dreams,
and Margaret had no gay inadvertence in her scheme of creation. So when
the lank, strapping, red-headed boy of a man's height, with a man's
shoulders and a child's heart, started to Harvey for high school every
morning, as she started to teach her country school, he carried with
him, beside his lunch, a definite impression that Margaret was a fine
girl. Often, indeed, he thought her an extraordinarily fine girl. Tales
of prowess he brought back from the Harvey High School, and she listened
with admiring face. For they related to youths whose names she knew as
children of the socially elect.

A part of her admiration for Grant was due to the fact that Grant had
leaped the social gulf--deep even then in Harvey--between those who
lived on the hill, and the dwellers in the bottoms near the river.

This instinctively Margaret Mueller knew, also--though perhaps
unconsciously--that even if they lived in the bottoms, the Adamses were
of the aristoi; because they were friends of the Nesbits, and Mrs.
Nesbit of Maryland was the fountain head of all the social glory of
Harvey. Thus Margaret Mueller of Spring Township came to camp before
Harvey for a lifetime siege, and took her ground where she could aim
straight at the Nesbits and Kollanders and Sandses and Mortons and
Calvins. With all her banners flying, banners gaudy and beautiful,
banners that flapped for men and sometimes snapped at women, she