PATCHWORK

A STORY OF

"THE PLAIN PEOPLE"

By ANNA BALMER MYERS

WITH FRONTISPIECE IN COLOR BY
HELEN MASON GROSE

A. L. BURT COMPANY
Publishers New York
Published by arrangement with George W. Jacobs & Company

Copyright, 1920, by
George W. Jacobs & Company
All rights reserved
Printed in U.S.A.

To my Mother and Father
this book is lovingly inscribed

"OH, LOOK AT THIS—AND THIS!"

Contents

Patchwork

CHAPTER I

CALICO PATCHWORK

The gorgeous sunshine of a perfect June morning invited to the great outdoors. Exquisite perfume from myriad blossoms tempted lovers of nature to get away from cramped, man-made buildings, out under the blue roof of heaven, and revel in the lavish splendor of the day.

This call of the Junetide came loudly and insistently to a little girl as she sat in the sitting-room of a prosperous farmhouse in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and sewed gaily-colored pieces of red and green calico into patchwork.

"Ach, my!" she sighed, with all the dreariness which a ten-year-old is capable of feeling, "why must I patch when it's so nice out? I just ain't goin' to sew no more to-day!"

She rose, folded her work and laid it in her plaited rush sewing-basket. Then she stood for a moment, irresolute, and listened to the sounds issuing from the next room. She could hear her Aunt Maria bustle about the big kitchen.

"Ach, I ain't afraid!"

The child opened the door and entered the kitchen, where the odor of boiling strawberry preserves proclaimed the cause of the aunt's activity.

Maria Metz was, at fifty, robust and comely, with black hair very slightly streaked with gray, cheeks that retained traces of the rosy coloring of her girlhood, and flashing black eyes meeting squarely the looks of all with whom she came in contact. She was a member of the Church of the Brethren and wore the quaint garb adopted by the women of that sect. Her dress of black calico was perfectly plain. The tight waist was half concealed by a long, pointed cape which fell over her shoulders and touched the waistline back and front, where a full apron of blue and white checked gingham was tied securely. Her dark hair was parted and smoothly drawn under a cap of white lawn. She was a picturesque figure but totally unconscious of it, for the section of Pennsylvania in which she lived has been for generations the home of a multitude of women similarly garbed—members of the plain sects, as the Mennonites, Amish, Brethren in Christ, and Church of the Brethren, are commonly called in the communities in which they flourish.

As the child appeared in the doorway her aunt turned.

"So," the woman said pleasantly, "you worked vonderful quick to-day once, Phœbe. Why, you got your patches done soon—did you make little stitches like I told you?"

"I ain't got 'em done!" The child stood erect, a defiant little figure, her blue eyes grown dark with the moment's tenseness. "I ain't goin' to sew no more when it's so nice out! I want to be out in the yard, that's what I want. I just hate this here patchin' to-day, that's what I do!"

Maria Metz carefully wiped the strawberry juice from her fingers, then she stood before the little girl like a veritable tower of amazement and strength.

"Phœbe," she said after a moment's struggle to control her wrath, "you ain't big enough nor old enough yet to tell me what you ain't goin' to do! How many patches did you make?"

"Three."

"And you know I said you shall make four every day still so you get the quilt done this summer yet and ready to quilt. You go and finish them."

"I don't want to." Phœbe shook her head stubbornly. "I want to play out in the yard."

"When you're done with the patches, not before! You know you must learn to sew. Why, Phœbe," the woman changed her tactics, "you used to like to sew still. When you was just five years old you cried for goods and needle and I pinned the patches on the little sewing-bird that belonged to Granny Metz still and screwed the bird on the table and you sewed that nice! And now you don't want to do no more patches—how will you ever get your big chest full of nice quilts if you don't patch?"

But the child was too thoroughly possessed with the desire to be outdoors to be won by any pleading or praise. She pulled savagely at the two long braids which hung over her shoulders and cried, "I don't want no quilts! I don't want no chests! I don't like red and green quilts, anyhow—never, never! I wish my pop would come in; he wouldn't make me sew patches, he"—she began to sob—"I wish, I just wish I had a mom! She wouldn't make me sew calico when—when I want to play."

Something in the utter unhappiness of the little girl, together with the words of yearning for the dead mother, filled the woman with a strange tenderness. Though she never allowed sentiment to sway her from doing what she considered her duty she did yield to its influence and spoke gently to the agitated child.

"I wish, too, your mom was here yet, Phœbe. But I guess if she was she'd want you to learn to sew. Ach, it's just that you like to be out, out all the time that makes you so contrary, I guess. You're like your pop, if you can just be out! Mebbe when you're old as I once and had your back near broke often as I had with hoein' and weedin' and plantin' in the garden you'll be glad when you can set in the house and sew. Ach, now, stop your cryin' and go finish your patchin' and when you're done I'll leave you go in to Greenwald for me to the store and to Granny Hogendobler."

"Oh"—the child lifted her tear-stained face—"and dare I really go to Greenwald when I'm done?"

"Yes. I need some sugar yet and you dare order it. And you can get me some thread and then stop at Granny Hogendobler's and ask her to come out to-morrow and help with the strawberry jelly. I got so much to make and it comes good to Granny if she gets away for a little change."

"Then I'll patch quick!" Phœbe said. The world was a good place again for the child as she went back to the sitting-room and resumed her sewing.

She was so eager to finish the unpleasant task that she forgot one of Aunt Maria's rules, as inexorable as the law of the Medes and Persians—the door between the kitchen and the sitting-room must be closed.

"Here, Phœbe," the woman called sharply, "make that door shut! Abody'd think you was born in a sawmill! The strawberry smell gets all over the house."

Phœbe turned alertly and closed the door. Then she soliloquized, "I don't see why there has to be doors on the inside of houses. I like to smell the good things all over the house, but then it's Aunt Maria's boss, not me."

Maria Metz shook her head as she returned to her berries. "If it don't beat all and if I won't have my hands full yet with that girl 'fore she's growed up! That stubborn she is, like her pop—ach, like all of us Metz's, I guess. Anyhow, it ain't easy raising somebody else's child. If only her mom would have lived, and so young she was to die, too."

Her thoughts went back to the time when her brother Jacob brought to the old Metz farmhouse his gentle, sweet-faced bride. Then the joint persuasions of Jacob and his wife induced Maria Metz to continue her residence in the old homestead. She relieved the bride of all the brunt of manual labor of the farm and in her capable way proved a worthy sister to the new mistress of the old Metz place. When, several years later, the gentle wife died and left Jacob the legacy of a helpless babe, it was Maria Metz who took up the task of mothering the motherless child. If she bungled at times in the performance of the mother's unfinished task it was not from lack of love, for she loved the fair little Phœbe with a passion that was almost abnormal, a passion which burned the more fiercely because there was seldom any outlet in demonstrative affection.

As soon as the child was old enough Aunt Maria began to teach her the doctrines of the plain church and to warn her against the evils of vanity, frivolity and all forms of worldliness.

Maria Metz was richly endowed with that admirable love of industry which is characteristic of the Pennsylvania Dutch. In accordance with her acceptance of the command, "Six days shalt thou labor," she swept, scrubbed, and toiled from early morning to evening with Herculean persistence. The farmhouse was spotless from cellar to attic, the wooden walks and porches scrubbed clean and smooth. Flower beds, vegetable gardens and lawns were kept neat and without weeds. Aunt Maria was, as she expressed it, "not afraid of work." Naturally she considered it her duty to teach little Phœbe to be industrious, to sew neatly, to help with light tasks about the house and gardens.

Like many other good foster-mothers Maria Metz tried conscientiously to care for the child's spiritual and physical well-being, but in spite of her best endeavors there were times when she despaired of the tremendous task she had undertaken. Phœbe's spirit tingled with the divine, poetic appreciation of all things beautiful. A vivid imagination carried the child into realms where the stolid aunt could not follow, realms of whose existence the older woman never dreamed.

But what troubled Maria Metz most was the child's frank avowal of vanity. Every new dress was a source of intense joy to Phœbe. Every new ribbon for her hair, no matter how narrow and dull of color, sent her face smiling. The golden hair, which sprang into long curls as Aunt Maria combed it, was invariably braided into two thick, tight braids, but there were always little wisps that curled about the ears and forehead. These wisps were at once the woman's despair and the child's freely expressed delight. However, through all the rigid discipline the little girl retained her natural buoyancy of childhood, the spontaneous interestedness, the cheerfulness and animation, which were a part of her goodly heritage.

That June morning the world was changed suddenly from a dismal vale of patchwork to a glorious garden of delight. She was still a child and the promised walk to Greenwald changed the entire world for her.

She paused once in her sewing to look about the sitting-room. "Ach, I vonder now why this room is so ugly to me to-day. I guess it's because it's so pretty out. Why, mostly always I think this is a vonderful nice room."

The sitting-room of the Metz farm was attractive in its old-fashioned furnishing. It was large and well lighted. The gray rag carpet—woven from rags sewed by Aunt Maria and Phœbe—was decorated with wide stripes of green. Upon the carpet were spread numerous rugs, some made of braided rags coiled into large circles, others were hooked rugs gaily ornamented with birds and flowers and graceful scroll designs. The low-backed chairs were painted dull green and each bore upon the four inch panel of its back a hand-painted floral design. On the haircloth sofa were several crazy-work cushions. Two deep rocking-chairs matched the antique low-backed chairs. A spindle-legged cherry table bore an old vase filled with pink and red straw flowers. The large square table, covered with a red and green cloth, held a glass lamp, the old Metz Bible, several hymn-books and the papers read in that home,—a weekly religious paper, the weekly town paper, and a well-known farm journal. A low walnut organ which Phœbe's mother brought to the farm and a tall walnut grandfather clock, the most cherished heirloom of the Metz family, occupied places of honor in the room. Not a single article of modern design could be found in the entire room, yet it was an interesting and habitable place. Most of the Metz furniture had stood in the old homestead for several generations and so long as any piece served its purpose and continued to look respectable Aunt Maria would have considered it gross extravagance, even a sacrilege, to discard it for one of newer design. She was satisfied with her house, her brother Jacob was well pleased with the way she kept it—it never occurred to her that Phœbe might ever desire new things, and least of all did she dream that the girl sometimes spent an interesting hour refurnishing, in imagination, the same old sitting-room.

"Yes," Phœbe was saying to herself, "sometimes this room is vonderful to me. Only I wished the organ was a piano, like the one Mary Warner got to play on. But, ach, I must hurry once and make this patch done. Funny thing patchin' is, cuttin' up big pieces of good calico in little ones and then sewin' them up in big ones again! I don't like it"—she spoke very softly for she knew her aunt disapproved of the habit of talking to one's self—"I don't like patchin' and I for certain don't like red and green quilts! I got one on my bed now and it hurts my eyes still in the morning when I get awake. I'd like a pretty blue and white one for my bed. Mebbe Aunt Maria will leave me make one when I get this one sewed. But now my patch is done and I dare to go to Greenwald. That's a vonderful nice walk."

A moment later she stood again in the big kitchen.

"See," she said, "now I got them all done. And little stitches, too, so nobody won't catch their toes in 'em when they sleep, like you used to tell me still when I first begun to sew."

The woman smiled. "Now you're a good girl, Phœbe. Put your patches away nice and you dare go to Greenwald."

"Where all shall I go?"

"Go first to Granny Hogendobler; that's right on the way to the store. You ask her to come out to-morrow morning early if she wants to help with the berries."

"Dare I stay a little?"

"If you want. But don't you go bringin' any more slips of flowers to plant or any seeds. The flower beds are that full now abody can hardly get in to weed 'em still."

"All right, I won't. But I think it's nice to have lots and lots of flowers. When I have a garden once I'll have it full——"

"Talk of that some other day," said her aunt. "Get ready now for town once. You go to the store and ask 'em to send out twenty pounds of granulated sugar. Jonas, one of the clerks, comes out this way still when he goes home and he can just as good fetch it along on his home road. Your pop is too busy to hitch up and go in for it and I have no time neither to-day and I want it early in the morning, and what I have is almost all. And then you can buy three spools of white thread number fifty. And when you're done you dare look around a little in the store if you don't touch nothing. On the home road you better stop in the post-office and ask if there's anything. Nobody was in yesterday."

"All right—and—Aunt Maria, dare I wear my hat?"

"Ach, no. Abody don't wear Sunday clothes on a Wednesday just to go to Greenwald to the store. Only when you go to Lancaster and on a Sunday you wear your hat. You're dressed good enough; just get your sunbonnet, for it's sunny on the road."

Phœbe took a small ruffled sunbonnet of blue checked gingham from a hook behind the kitchen door and pressed it lightly on her head.

"Ach, bonnets are vonderful hot things!" she exclaimed. "A nice parasol like Mary Warner's got would be lots nicer. Where's the money?" she asked as she saw a shadow of displeasure on her aunt's face.

"Here it is, enough for the sugar and the thread. Don't lose the pocketbook, and be sure to count the change so they don't make no mistake."

"Yes."

"And don't touch things in the store."

"No." The child walked to the door, impatient to be off.

"And be careful crossin' over the streets. If a horse comes, or a bicycle, wait till it's past, or an automobile——"

"Ach, yes, I'll be careful," Phœbe answered.

A moment later she went down the boardwalk that led through the yard to the little green gate at the country road. There she paused and looked back at the farm with its old-fashioned house, her birthplace and home.

The Metz homestead, erected in the days of home-grown flax and spinning-wheels, was plain and unpretentious. Built of gray, rough-hewn quarry stone it hid like a demure Quakeress behind tall evergreen trees whose branches touched and interlaced in so many places that the traveler on the country road caught but mere glimpses of the big gray house.

The old home stood facing the road that led northward to the little town of Greenwald. Southward the road curved and wound itself about a steep hill, sent its branches right and left to numerous farms while it, still twisting and turning, went on to the nearest city, Lancaster, ten miles distant.

The Metz farm was just outside the southern limits of the town of Greenwald. The spacious red barn stood on the very bank of Chicques Creek, the boundary line.

"It's awful pretty here to-day," Phœbe said aloud as she looked from the house with its sheltering trees to the flower garden with its roses, larkspur and other old-fashioned flowers, then to the background of undulating fields and hills. "It's just vonderful pretty here to-day. But, ach, I guess it's pretty most anywheres on a day like this—but not in the house. Ugh, that patchin'! I want to forget it."

As she closed the gate and entered the country road she caught sight of a familiar figure just ahead.

"Hello," she called. "Wait once, David! Is that you?"

"No, it ain't me, it's my shadow!" came the answer as a boy, several years older than Phœbe, turned and waited for her.

"Ach, David Eby," she giggled, "you're just like Aunt Maria says still you are—always cuttin' up and talkin' so abody don't know if you mean it or what. Goin' in to town, too, once?"

"Um-uh. Say, Phœbe, you want a rose to pin on?" he asked, turning to her with a pink damask rose.

"Why, be sure I do! I just like them roses vonderful much. We got 'em too, big bushes of 'em, but Aunt Maria won't let me pull none off. Where'd you get yourn?"

"We got lots. Mom lets me pull off all I want. You pin it on and be decorated for Greenwald. Where all you going, Phœbe?"

"And I say thanks, too, David, for the rose," she said as she pinned the rose to her dress. "Um, it smells good! Where am I goin'?" she remembered his question. "Why, to the store and to Granny Hogendobler and the post-office——"

"Jimminy Crickets!" The boy stood still. "That's where I'm to go! Me and mom both forgot about it. Mom wants a money order and said I'm to get it the first time I go to town and here I am without the money. It's home up the hill again for me."

"Ach, David, don't you know that it's vonderful bad luck to go back for something when you got started once?"

The boy laughed. "It is bad luck to have to climb that hill again. But mom'll say what I ain't got in my head I got to have in my feet. They're big enough to hold a lot, too, Phœbe, ain't they?"

She giggled, then laughed merrily. "Ach," she said, "you say funny things. You just make me laugh all the time. But it's mean, now, that you are so dumb to forget and have to go back. I thought I'd have nice company all the ways in, but mebbe I'll see you in Greenwald."

"Mebbe. Goo'bye," said the boy and turned to the hill again.

Phœbe stood a moment and looked after him. "My," she said to herself, "but David Eby is a vonderful nice boy!" Then she started down the road, a quaint, interesting little figure in her brown chambray dress with its full, gathered skirt and its short, plain waist. But the face that looked out from the blue sunbonnet was even more interesting. The blue eyes, golden hair and fair coloring of the cheeks held promise of an abiding beauty, but more than mere beauty was bounded by the ruffled sunbonnet. There was an eagerness of expression, an alert understanding in the deep eyes, a tender fluttering of the long lashes, an ever varying animation in the child face, as though she were standing on tiptoe to catch all the sunshine and glory of the great, beautiful world about her.

Phœbe went decorously down the road, across the wooden bridge over the Chicques, then she began to skip. Her full skirt fluttered in the light wind, her sunbonnet slipped back from her head and flapped as she hopped along the half mile stretch of country road bordered by green fields and meadows.

"There's no houses here so I dare skip," she panted gleefully. "Aunt Maria don't think it looks nice for girls to skip, but I like to do it. I could just skip and skip and skip——"

She stopped suddenly. In a meadow to her right a tangle of bulrushes edged a small pond and, perched on a swaying reed, a red-winged blackbird was calling his clear, "Conqueree, conqueree."

"Oh, you pretty thing!" Phœbe cried as she leaned on the fence and watched the bird. "You're just the prettiest thing with them red and yellow spots on your wings. And you ain't afraid of me, not a bit. I guess mebbe you know you got wings and I ain't. Such pretty wings you got, too, and the rest of you is all black as coal. Mebbe God made you black all over like a crow and then got sorry for you and put some pretty spots on your wings. I wonder now"—her face sobered—"I just wonder now why Aunt Maria says still that it's bad to fix up pretty with curls and things like that and to wear fancy dresses. Why, many of the birds are vonderful fine in gay feathers and the flowers are fancy and the butterflies—ach, mebbe when I'm big I'll understand it better, or mebbe I'll dress up pretty then too."

With that cheering thought she turned again to the road and resumed her walk, but the skipping mood had fled. She pulled her sunbonnet to its proper place and walked briskly along, still enjoying thoroughly, though less exuberantly, the beauty of the June morning.

The scent of pink clover mingled with the odor of grasses and the delicate perfume of sweetbrier. Wood sorrel nestled in the grassy corners near the crude rail fences, daisies and spiked toad-flax grew lavishly among the weeds of the roadside. In the meadows tall milkweed swayed its clusters of pink and lavender, marsh-marigolds dotted the grass with discs of pure gold, and Queen Anne's lace lifted its parasols of exquisite loveliness. Phœbe reveled in it all; her cheeks were glowing as she left the beauty of the country behind her and came at last to the little town of Greenwald.

CHAPTER II

OLD AARON'S FLAG

Greenwald is an old town but it is a delightfully interesting one. It does not wear its antiquity as an excuse for sinking into mouldering uselessness. It presents, rather, a strange mingling of the quaint, romantic and historic with the beautiful, progressive and modern. Though it clings reverently to honored traditions it is ever mindful of the fact that the welfare of its inhabitants is dependent upon reasonable progress in its religious, educational and industrial life.

The charming stamp of its antiquity is revealed in its great old trees; its wide Market Square from which narrower streets branch to the east, west, north and south; its numerous houses of the plain, substantial type of several generations ago; its occasional little, low houses which have withstood the march of modern building and stand squarely beside houses of more elaborate and later design; but chiefly in its old-fashioned gardens. All the old-time flowers are favorites there and refuse to be displaced by any newcomer. Sweet alyssum and candytuft spread carpets of bloom along the neat garden walks, hollyhocks and dahlias look boldly out to the streets, while the old-fashioned sweet-scented roses grow on great bushes which have been undisturbed for three or more generations.

To Phœbe Metz, Greenwald, with its two thousand inhabitants, its several churches, post-office and numerous stores, seemed a veritable city. She delighted in walking on its brick sidewalks, looking at its different houses and entering its stores. How many attractions these stores held for the little country girl! There was the big one on the Square which had in one of its windows a great lemon tree on which grew real lemons. Another store had a large Santa Claus in its window every Christmas—not that Phœbe Metz had ever been taught to believe in that patron saint of the children—oh, no! Maria Metz would have considered it foolish, even sinful, to lie to a child about any mythical Santa Claus coming down the chimney Christmas Eve! Nevertheless, the smiling, rotund face of the red-habited Santa in the store window seemed so real and so emanative of cheer that Phœbe delighted in him each year and felt sure there must be a Santa Claus somewhere in the world, even though Aunt Maria knew nothing about him.

Most little towns can boast of one or more persons like Granny Hogendobler, well-nigh community owned, certainly community appropriated. Did any one need a helper in garden or kitchen or sewing room, Granny Hogendobler was glad to serve. Did a housewife remember that a rose geranium leaf imparts to apple jelly a delicious flavor, Granny Hogendobler was able and willing to furnish the leaf. Did a lover of flowers covet a new phlox or dahlia or other old-fashioned flower, Granny Hogendobler was ready to give of her stock. Should a young wife desire a recipe for crullers, shoo-fly pie, or other delectable dish, Granny had a wealth of reliable recipes at her tongue's end. This admirable desire to serve found ample opportunities for exercise in the constant demands from her friends and neighbors. But Granny's greatest joy lay in the fond ministrations for her husband, Old Aaron, as the town people called him, half pityingly, half accusingly. For some said Old Aaron was plain shiftless, had always been so, would remain so forever, so long as he had Granny to do for him. Others averred that the Confederate bullets that had shattered his leg into splinters and necessitated its amputation must have gone astray and struck his liver—leastways, that was the kindest explanation they could give for his laziness.

Granny stoutly refuted all these charges—gossip travels in circles in small towns and sooner or later reaches those most concerned—"Aaron lazy! I-to-goodness no! Why, he's old and what for should he go out and work every day, I wonder. He helps me with the garden and so, and when I go out to help somebody for a day or two he gets his own meals and tends the chickens still. Some people thought a few years ago that he might get work in the foundry, but I said I want him at home with me. He gets a pension and we can live good on what we have without him slaving his last years away, and him with one leg lost at Gettysburg!" she ended proudly.

So Old Aaron continued to live his life as pleased his mate and himself. He pottered about the house and garden and spent long hours musing under the grape arbor. But there was one day in every year when Old Aaron came into his own. Every Memorial Day he dressed in his venerated blue uniform and carried the flag down the dusty streets of Greenwald, out to the dustier road to a spot a mile from the heart of the town, where, on a sunny hilltop, some of his comrades rested in the Silent City.

Only the infirm and the ill of the town failed to run to look as the little procession passed down the street. There were boys in khaki, the town band playing its best, volunteer firemen clad in vivid red shirts, a low, hand-drawn wagon filled with flowers, an old cannon, also hand-drawn, whose shots over the graves of the dead veterans would thrill as they thrilled every May thirtieth—all received attention and admiration from the watchers of the procession. But the real honors of the day were accorded the "thin blue line of heroes," and Old Aaron was one of these. To Granny Hogendobler, who walked with the crowd of cheering children and adults and kept step on the sidewalk with the step of the marchers on the street, it was evident that the standard bearer was growing old. The steep climb near the cemetery entrance left him breathless and flushed and each year Granny thought, "It's getting too much for him to carry that flag." But each returning year she would have spurned as earnestly as he any suggestion that another one be chosen to carry that flag. And so every three hundred and sixty-fifth day the lean straight figure of Old Aaron marched directly under the fluttering folds of Old Glory and the soldier became a subject worthy of veneration, then with customary nonchalance the little town forgot him again or spoke of him as Old Aaron, a little lazy, a little shiftless, a little childish, and Granny Hogendobler became the more important figure of that household.

Granny was fifteen years younger than her husband and was undeniably rotund of hips and face, the former rotundity increased by her full skirts, the latter accentuated by her style of wearing her hair combed back into a tight knot near the top of her head and held in place by a huge black back-comb.

From this style of hair dressing it is evident that Granny was not a member of any plain sect. She was, as she said, "An Evangelical, one of the old kind yet. I can say Amen to the preacher's sermon and stand up in prayer-meeting and tell how the Lord has blessed me."

There were some who doubted the rich blessing of which Granny spoke. "I wouldn't think the Lord blessed me so much," whispered one, "if I had a man like Old Aaron, though I guess he's good enough to her. And that boy of theirs never comes home; he must have a funny streak in him too." "But think of this," one would answer, "how the Lord keeps her cheerful, kind and faithful through all her troubles."

Granny's was a wonderful garden. She and Old Aaron lived in a little gray cube of a house that had its front face set straight to the edge of Charlotte Street. However, the north side of the cube looked into a great green yard where tall spruce trees, overrun with trumpet vines and woodbine, shaded long beds of flowers that love semi-shady places. The rear of the house overlooked an old-fashioned garden enclosed with a white-washed picket fence. Always were there flowers at Granny's house. In the cold days of winter blooming masses of geraniums, primroses and gloxinias crowded against the little square panes of the windows and looked defiantly out at the snow; while all the old favorites grew in the garden, from the first March snowdrop to the late November chrysanthemum. In June, therefore, the garden was a "Lovesome spot" indeed.

"It vonders me now if Granny's home," thought Phœbe as she opened the wooden gate and entered the yard.

"Here I am," called Granny. "Back in the garden. I-to-goodness, Phœbe, did you come once! I just said yesterday to Aaron that I didn't see none of you folks for long, and here you come! You haven't seen the flowers for a while."

"Oh!" Phœbe breathed an ecstatic little word of delight. "Oh, your garden is just vonderful pretty!"

"Ain't," agreed Granny. "Aaron and me's been working pretty hard in it these weeks. There he is, out in the potato patch; see him?"

Phœbe stood on tiptoe and looked where Granny's finger pointed to the extreme end of the long vegetable garden, where the white head of Old Aaron was bending over his hoeing.

"He's hoeing the potatoes," Granny explained. "He don't see you. But he'll soon be done and come in."

"What were you doin'?" asked the child.

"Weeding the flag."

"Weedin' the flag—what do you mean?" Phœbe's eyes lighted with eagerness. "I guess you mean mendin' the flag, Granny." She looked toward the porch as if in search of Old Glory.

"I said weeding the flag," the woman insisted. "It's an idea of Aaron's and I guess I'll tell you about it, seeing your eyes are open so wide. See the poppies, that long stretch of them in the middle of the garden?"

"Um-uh," nodded Phœbe.

"Well, that patch at the back is all red poppies, the buds just coming on them nice and big. Then right in front of them is another patch of white poppies; the buds are thick on them, too. And right in front of them—you see what's there!"

"Larkspur, blue larkspur!" cried Phœbe. "Oh, I see—it's red, white and blue! You'll have it all summer in your garden!"

"Yes. When it blooms it'll be a grand sight. I said to Aaron that we'll have all the children of Greenwald in looking at his flag and he said he hopes so, for they couldn't look at anything better than the colors of Old Glory. Aaron's crazy about the flag."

"'Cause he fought for it, mebbe."

"Yes, I guess. His father died for it at Gettysburg, the same place where Aaron lost his leg. . . . The only thing is, the larkspur's getting ahead of the poppies—seems like the larkspur couldn't wait"—her voice continued low—"I always love to see the larkspur come."

"I too," said the child. "I like to pull out the little slippers from the middle of the flowers and fit 'em into each other and make circles with 'em. I made a lot last summer and pressed 'em in a book, but Aunt Maria made me stop."

"That's just what Nason used to do. I have some pressed in the big Bible yet that he made when he was a little boy." She spoke half-absently, as though momentarily forgetful of the child's presence.

"Who's Nason?" asked Phœbe.

Granny started. "I-to-goodness, Phœbe, I forgot! You don't know him, never heard of him, I guess. He's our boy. We had a little girl, too, but she died."

"Did the boy die too, Granny?"

"No, ach no! You wouldn't understand. He's living in the city. He writes to me often but he don't come home. He and his pop fell out about the flag once when Nason was young and foolish and they're both too stubborn to forget it."

"But he'll come back some day and live with you, of course, won't he?" Phœbe comforted her.

"Yes—some day they'll see things different. But now don't you bother that head of yourn with such things. You forget all about Nason. Come now, sit on the bench a little under the arbor."

"Just a little. I must go to the store yet."

"You have lots to do."

"Yes. And I almost forgot what I come for. Aunt Maria wants you should come out to our place to-morrow early and help with the strawberries if you can."

"I'll come. I like to come to your place. Your Aunt Maria is so straight out, nothing false about her. I like her. But now I bet you're thinking of how many berries you can eat," she added as she noted the child's abstracted look.

"No—I was thinkin'—I was just thinkin' what a funny name Nason is, like you tried to say Nathan and got your tongue twisted."

"It's a real name, but you must forget all about it."

"If I can. Sometimes Aunt Maria tells me to forget things, like wantin' curls and fancy things and pretty dresses but I don't see how I can forget when I remember, do you?"

"It's hard," Granny said, a deeper meaning in her words than the child could comprehend. "It's the hardest thing in the world to forget what you want to forget. But here comes Aaron——"

"Well, well, if here ain't Phœbe Metz with her eyes shining and a pink rose pinned to her waist and matching the roses in her cheeks!" the old soldier said as he joined the two under the arbor. "Whew! Mebbe it ain't hot hoeing potatoes!"

"You're all heated up, Aaron," said Granny. His fifteen years seniority warranted a solicitous watchfulness over him, she thought. "Now you get cooled off a little and I'll make some lemonade. It'll taste good to me and Phœbe, too."

"All right, Ma," Aaron sighed in relaxation. "You know how to touch the spot. Did you tell Phœbe about the flag?"

"Yes."

"Oh, I think it's fine!" cried the child. "I can't wait till all the flowers bloom. I want to see it."

"You'll see it," promised the man. "And you bring all the boys and girls in too."

"And then will you tell us about the war and the Battle of Gettysburg? David Eby says he heard you once tell about it. I think it was at some school celebration. And he says it was grand, just like being there yourself."

"A little safer," laughed the old soldier. "But, yes, when the poppies bloom you bring the children in and I'll tell you about the war and the flag."

"I'll remember. I love to hear about the war. Old Johnny Schlegelmilch from way up the country comes to our place still to sell brooms, and once last summer he came and it began to thunder and storm and pop said he shall stay till it's over and then he told me all about the war. He said our flag's the prettiest in the whole world."

"So it is," solemnly affirmed Old Aaron.

"I wonder if anybody it belongs to could help liking it," said the child, remembering Granny's words.

"Well," the veteran answered slowly, "I knew a young fellow once, a nice fellow he seemed, too, and his father a soldier who fought for the flag. Well, the father was always talking about the flag and what it means and how every man should be ready to fight for it. And one day the boy said that he would never fight for it and be shot to pieces, that the old flag made him sick, and one soldier in the family was enough."

"Oh!" Phœbe opened her eyes wide in surprise and horror.

"And the father told the boy," the old man went on in a fixed voice as though the veriest details of the story were vividly before him, "that if he would not take back those words he never wanted to see him again. It was better to have no son, than such a son, a coward who hated the flag."

Here Granny appeared with the lemonade and the story was abruptly ended. Phœbe refrained from questioning the man about the story but as she sat under the arbor and afterwards, as she started up the street of the little town, she wondered over and over how a boy could be the son of a soldier and hate the flag, and whether the story Old Aaron told her was the story of himself and Nason.

CHAPTER III

LITTLE DUTCHIE

"Aunt Maria said I dare look around a little," thought Phœbe as she neared the big store on the Square. Her heart beat more quickly as she turned the knob of the heavy door—little things still thrilled her, going to the store in Greenwald was an event!

The clerk's courteous, "What can I do for you?" bewildered her for an instant but she swallowed hard and said, "Why, we want twenty pounds of granulated sugar; ourn is almost all and Aunt Maria wants to make some strawberry jelly to-morrow. She said for Jonas to fetch it along on his home road."

"All right. Out to Jacob Metz?"

"Yes, he's my pop."

"I see. Anything else?"

"Three spools white thread, number fifty."

"Anything else?"

She shook her head as she handed him the money. "No, that's all for to-day. But Aunt Maria said I dare look around a little if I don't touch things."

"Look all you want," said the clerk and turned away, smiling.

Phœbe began a slow tramp about the big store. There was the same glass case filled with jewelry. The rings and pins rested on satin that had faded long since, the jewelry itself was tarnished but it held Phœbe's interest with its meagre glistening. One little ring with a tiny turquoise aroused her desire but she realized that she was longing for the impossible, so she moved away from the coveted treasures and paused before the ribbons. Some of those same ribbons had been in the tall revolving case ever since she could remember going to that store. The pale sea-green and the crushed-strawberry were faded horribly, yet she looked at them with longing. "Suppose," she thought, "I dared pick out any ribbon I want for a sash—guess I'd take that funny pink one, or mebbe that nice blue one. But I kinda think I'd rather have a set of dishes or a doll. But then I got that rag doll at home and that pretty one that pop got for me in Lancaster and that Aunt Maria won't leave me play with. That's funny now, that she says still I daren't play with it for I might break it, that I shall keep it till I'm big. But when I'm big I won't want a doll, and then I vonder what! What will I do with it then?"

She stood a long time before a table crowded with a motley gathering of toys, dolls and books. With so much coveted treasure before her it was hard to remember Aunt Maria's injunction to refrain from touching.

"Well, anyhow," she decided finally, "I won't need any of these things to play with now, for I'm going to be out in the garden and the yard with the flowers and birds. So I guess my old rag doll will be plenty for playin' with. But I mustn't look too long else Aunt Maria won't leave me come in soon again. I'll walk down the other side of the store now yet and then I must go."

She passed slowly along, her keen eyes noticing the varied assortment of articles displayed for sale. A long line of red handkerchiefs was fastened to a cord high above one counter. Long shelves were stacked high with ginghams, calicoes and finer dress materials. There were gaudy rugs and blankets tacked to the walls near the ceiling. Counters were filled with glassware, china and crockery; other counters were laden with umbrellas, hats, shoes——

"Ach," she sighed as she went out to the street, "I think this goin' to Greenwald to the store is vonderful nice! It's most as much fun as goin' in to Lancaster, only there I go in a trolley and I see black niggers"—she spoke the word with a little shiver, for Greenwald had no negro residents—"and once in there me and Aunt Maria saw a Chinaman with a long plait like a girl's hangin' down his back!"

After asking for the mail at the post-office she turned homeward, feeling like singing from sheer happiness. Then she looked down at her pink damask rose—it was withered.

"I'm goin' home now so I guess I won't be decorated no more." She unpinned the flower, clasped its short stem in her hand and raised the blossom to her face.

"Um-m-m!" She drew deep breaths of the rose's perfume. "Um-m!"

"Does it smell good?"

Phœbe turned her head at the voice and looked into the face of a young woman who sat on the porch of a near-by house.

"Does it smell good?" The question came again, accompanied by a broad smile.

Quickly the hand holding the flower dropped to the child's side, her eyes were cast down to the brick pavement and she went hurriedly down the street. But not so hurriedly that she failed to hear the words, "Little Dutchie" and a merry laugh from the young woman.

"She—she laughed at me!" Phœbe murmured to herself under the blue sunbonnet. "I don't know who she is, but that was at Mollie Stern's house that she sat—that lady that laughed at me. She called me a Dutchie!"

The child stabbed a fist into one eye and then into the other to fight back the tears. She felt sure that the appellation of Dutchie was not complimentary. Hadn't she heard the boys at school tease each other by calling, "Dutchie, Dutchie, sauer kraut!" But no one had ever called her that before! Her heart ached as she went down the street of the little town. She had planned to look at all the gardens of the main street as she walked home but the glory of the June day was spoiled for her. She did not care to look at any gardens. The laughing words, "Does it smell good?" rang in her ears. The name, "Little Dutchie," sent her heart throbbing.

After the first hurt a feeling of wrath rose in her. "Anyhow," she thought, "it's no disgrace to be a Dutchie! Nobody needn't laugh at me for that. But I just hate that lady that laughed at me! I hate everybody that pokes fun at me. And I ain't goin' to always be a Dutchie. You see once if I don't be something else when I grow up!"

"Hello, Phœbe," a cheery voice rang out, followed by a deeper exclamation, "Phœbe!" as she came to the last intersection of streets in the town and turned to enter the country road.

She turned a sober little face to the speakers, David Eby and his cousin, Phares Eby.

"Hello," she answered listlessly.

"What's wrong?" asked the older boy as they joined her.

Both were plainly country boys accustomed to hard farm work, but their tanned faces were frank and honest under broad straw hats. Each bore marked family resemblances in their big frames, dark eyes and well-shaped heads, but there was a distinct line drawn between their personalities. Phares Eby at sixteen was grave, studious and dignified; his cousin, David, two years younger, was a cheery, laughing, sociable boy, fond of boyish sports, delighting in teasing his schoolmates and enjoying their retaliation, preferring a tramp through the woods to the best book ever written.

The boys lived on adjacent farms and had long been the nearest neighbors of the Metz family; thus they had become Phœbe's playmates. Then, too, the Eby families were members of the Church of the Brethren, the mothers of the boys were old friends of Maria Metz, and a deep friendship existed among them all. Phœbe and the two boys attended the same little country school and had become frankly fond of each other.

"What's wrong?" asked Phares again as Phœbe hung her head and remained silent.

"Ach," laughed David, "somebody's broke her dolly."

"Nobody ain't not broke my dolly, David Eby!" she said crossly. "I wouldn't cry for that!"

"What's wrong then?—come on, Phœbe." He pushed the sunbonnet back and patted her roguishly on the head. But she drew away from him.

"Don't you touch me," she cried. "I'm a Dutchie!"

"What?"

She tossed her head and became silent again.

"Come on, tell me," coaxed David. "I want to know what's wrong. Why, if you don't tell me I'll be so worried I won't be able to eat any dinner, and I'm so hungry now I could eat nails."

The girl laughed suddenly in spite of herself—"Ach, David, you're awful simple! Abody has to laugh at you. I was mad, for when I was in Greenwald I was smellin' a rose, that pink rose you gave me, and some lady on Mollie Stern's porch laughed at me and called me a Little Dutchie! Now wouldn't you got mad for that?"

But David threw back his head and laughed. "And you were ready to cry at that?" he said. "Why, I'm a Dutchie, so is Phares, so's most of the people round here. Ain't so, Phares?"

"Yes, guess so," the older boy assented, his eyes still upon Phœbe. "D'ye know," he said, addressing her, "when you were cross a few minutes ago your eyes were almost black. You shouldn't get so angry still, Phœbe."

"I don't care," she retorted quickly, "I don't care if my eyes was purple!"

"But you should care," persisted the boy gravely. "I don't like you so angry."

"Ach," she flashed an indignant look at him—"Phares Eby, you're by far too bossy! I like David best; he don't boss me all the time like you do!"

David laughed but Phares appeared hurt.

Phœbe was quick to note it. "Now I hurt you like that lady hurt me, ain't, Phares?" she said contritely. "But I didn't mean to hurt you, Phares, honest."

"But you like me best," said David gaily. "You can't take that back, remember."

She gave him a scornful look. Then she remembered the flag in the Hogendobler garden and became happy and eager again as she said, "Oh, Phares, David, I know the best secret!"

"Can't keep it, I bet!" challenged David.

"Can't I?" she retorted saucily. "Now for that I won't tell you till you get good and anxious. But then it's not really a secret." The flag of growing flowers was too glorious a thing to keep; she compromised—"I'll tell you, because it's not a real secret." And she proceeded to unfold with earnest gesticulations the story about the flowers of red and white and blue and the invitation for all who cared to come and see the colors of Old Glory growing in the garden of Old Aaron and Granny, and of the added pleasure of hearing Old Aaron tell his thrilling story of the battle of Gettysburg.

"I won't want to hear about any battle," said Phares. "I think war is horrible, awful, wicked."

"Mebbe so," said the girl, "but the poor men who fight in wars ain't always awful, horrible, wicked. You needn't turn your nose up at the old soldiers. Folks call Old Aaron lazy, I heard 'em a'ready, lots of times, but I bet some of them wouldn't have fought like he did and left a leg at Gettysburg and—ach, I think Old Aaron is just vonderful grand!" she ended in an impulsive burst of eloquence.

"Hooray!" shouted David. "So do I! When he carries the flag out the pike every Decoration Day he's somebody, all right."

"Ain't now!" agreed Phœbe.

"Been in the stores?" David asked her, feeling that a change of subject might be wise.

"Yes."

"See anything pretty?"

"Ach, yes. A lots of things. I saw the prettiest finger ring with a blue stone in. I wish I had it."

"What would Aunt Maria say to that?" wondered David.

"Ach, she'd say that so long as my finger ain't broke I don't need a band on it. But I looked at the ring at any rate and wished I had it."

"You dare never wear gold rings," Phares told her.

"Not now," she returned, "but some day when I'm older mebbe I'll wear a lot of 'em if I want."

The words set the boys thinking. Each wondered what manner of woman their little playmate would become.

"I bet she'll be a good-looking one," thought David. "She'd look swell dressed up fine like some of the people I see in town."

"Of course she'll turn plain some day like her aunt," thought the other boy. "She'll look nice in the plain dress and the white cap."

Phœbe, ignorant of the visions her innocent words had called to the hearts of her comrades, chattered on until they reached the little green gate of the Metz farm.

"Now you two must climb the hill yet. I'm glad I'm home. I'm hungry."

"And me," the boys answered, and with good-byes were off on the winding road up the hill.

As Phœbe turned the corner of the big gray house she came face to face with her father.

"So here you are, Phœbe," he said, smiling at sight of her. "Your Aunt Maria sent me out to look if you were coming. It's time to eat. Been to the store, ain't?"

"Yes, pop. I went alone."

"So? Why, you're getting a big girl, now you can go to Greenwald alone."

"Ach," she laughed. "Why, it's just straight road."

They crossed the porch and entered the kitchen hand-in-hand, the sunbonneted little girl and the big farmer. Jacob Metz was also a member of the Church of the Brethren and bore the distinctive mark: hair parted in the middle and combed straight back over his ears and cut so that the edge of it almost touched his collar. A heavy black beard concealed his chin, mild brown eyes gleamed beneath a pair of heavy black brows. Only in the wide, high forehead and the resolute mouth could be seen any resemblance between him and the fair child by his side.

When they entered the kitchen Maria Metz turned from the stove, where she had been stirring the contents of a big iron pan.

"So you got back safe, after all, Phœbe," she said with a sigh of relief. "I was afraid mebbe something happened to you, with so many streets to go across and so many teams all the time and the automobiles."

"Ach, I look both ways still before I start over. Granny Hogendobler said she'll get out early."

"So. What did she have to say?"

"Ach, lots. She showed me her flowers. Ain't it too bad, now, that her little girl died and her boy went away?"

"Well, she spoiled that boy. He grew up to be not much account if he stays away just because he and his pop had words once."

"But he'll come back some day. Granny knows he will." The child echoed the old mother's confidence.

"Not much chance of that," said Aunt Maria with her usual decisiveness. "When a man goes off like that he mostly always stays off. He writes to her she says and I guess she's just as good off with that as if he come home to live. She's lived this long without him."

"But," argued Phœbe, the maternal in her over-sweeping all else, "he's her boy and she wants him back!"

"Ach," the aunt said impatiently, "you talk too much. Were you at the store?"

"Yes. I got the thread and ordered the sugar and counted the change and there was nothing in the post-office for us."

"Did you enjoy your trip to town?" asked the father.

"Yes—but——"

"But what?" demanded Aunt Maria. "Did you break anything in the store now?"

"No. I just got mad. It was this way"—and she told the story of her pink rose.

Maria Metz frowned. "David Eby should leave his mom's roses on the stalks where they belong. Anyhow, I guess you did look funny if you poked your nose in it like you do still here."

"But she had no business to laugh at me, had she, pop?"

"You're too touchy," he said kindly. "But did you say the lady was on Mollie Stern's porch?"

"Yes."

"Then I guess it was her cousin from Philadelphia, the one that was elected to teach the school on the hill for next winter."

"Oh, pop, not our school?"

"Yes. Anyhow, her cousin was elected yesterday to teach your school. It seems she wanted to teach in the country and Mollie's pop is friends with a lot of our directors and they voted her in."

"I ain't goin' to school then!" Phœbe almost sobbed. "I don't like her, I don't want to go to her school; she laughed at me."

"Come, come," the father laid his hands on her head and spoke gently yet in a tone that she respected. "You mustn't get worked up over it. She's a nice young lady, and it will be something new to have a teacher from Philadelphia. Anyhow, it's a long ways yet till school begins."

"I'm glad it is."

"Come," interrupted the aunt, "help now to dish up. It's time to eat once. We're Pennsylvania Dutch, so what's the use gettin' cross when we're called that?"

"Yes," Phœbe's father said, smiling, "I'm a Dutchie too, but I'm a big Dutchie."

Phœbe smiled, but all through the meal and during the days that followed she thought often of the rose. Her heart was bitter toward the new teacher and she resolved never, never to like her!

CHAPTER IV

THE NEW TEACHER

The first Monday in September was the opening day of the rural school on the hill. Phœbe woke that morning before daylight. At four she heard her Aunt Maria tramp about in heavy shoes. It was Monday and wash-day and to Maria Metz the two words were so closely linked that nothing less than serious illness or death could part them.

"Ach, my," Phœbe sighed as she turned again under her red and green quilt, "this is the first day of school! Wish Aunt Maria'd forget to call me till it's too late to go."

At five-thirty she heard her father go down-stairs and soon after that came her aunt's loud call, "Phœbe, it's time to get up. Get up now and get down for I have breakfast made."

"Yes," came the dreary answer.

"Now don't you go asleep again."

"No, I'm awake. Shall I dress right aways for school?"

"No. Put on your old brown gingham once."

Phœbe made a wry face. "Ugh, that ugly brown gingham! What for did anybody ever buy brown when there are such pretty colors in the stores?"

A moment later she pushed back the gay quilt and sat on the edge of the bed. The first gleams of day-break sent bright streaks of light into her room as she sat on the high walnut bed and swung her bare feet back and forth.

"It's the first time I wasn't glad for school," she soliloquized softly. "I used to could hardly wait still, and I'd be glad this time if we didn't have that teacher from Phildelphy. Miss Virginia Lee her name is, and she's pretty like the name, but I don't like her! Guess she's that stuck up, comin' from the city, that she'll laugh all the time at us country people. I don't like people that poke fun at me, you bet I don't! I vonder now, mebbe I am funny to look at, that she laughed at me. But if I was I think somebody would 'a' told me long ago. I don't see what for she laughed so at me."

She sprang from the bed and ran to the window, pulled the cord of the green shade and sent it rattling to the top. Then she stood on tiptoe before the mirror in the walnut bureau, but the glass was hung too high for a satisfactory scrutiny of her features. She pushed a cane-seated chair before the bureau, knelt upon it and brought her face close to the glass.

"Um," she surveyed herself soberly. "Well, now, mebbe if my hair was combed I'd look better."

She pulled the tousled braids, opened them and shook her head until the golden hair hung about her face in all its glory.

"Why"—she gasped at the sudden change she had wrought, then laughed aloud from sheer childish happiness in her own miracle—"Why," she said gladly, "I ain't near so funny lookin' with my hair opened and down instead of pulled back in two tight plaits! But I wish Aunt Maria'd leave me have curls. I'd have a lot, and long ones, longer'n Mary Warner's."

"Phœbe!" Aunt Maria's voice startled the little girl. "What in the world are you doing lookin' in that glass so? And your knees on a cane-bottom chair! You know better than that. What for are you lookin' at yourself like that? You ought to be ashamed to be so vain."

Phœbe left the chair and looked at her aunt.

"Why," she said in an amazed voice, "I wasn't being vain! I was just lookin' to see if I am funny lookin' that it made Miss Lee laugh at me. And I found out that I'm much nicer to look at with my hair open than in plaits. You say still I mustn't have curls, but can't you see how much nicer I look this way——"

"Ach," interrupted her aunt, "don't talk so dumb! I guess you ain't any funnier lookin' than other people, and if you was it wouldn't matter long as you're a good girl."

"But I wouldn't be a good girl if I looked like some people I saw a'ready. If I had such big ears and crooked nose and big mouth——"

"Phœbe, you talk vonderful! Where do you get such nonsense put in your head?"

"I just think it and then I say it. But was that bad? I didn't mean it for bad."

She looked so like a cherub of absolute innocency with her deep blue eyes opened wide in wonder, her golden hair tumbled about her face and streaming over the shoulders of her white muslin nightgown, that Aunt Maria, though she had never heard of Reynolds' cherubs, was moved by the adorable picture.

"I know, Phœbe," she said kindly, "that you want to be a good girl. But you say such funny things still that I vonder sometimes if I'm raisin' you the right way. Come, hurry, now get dressed. Your pop's goin' way over to the field near Snavely's and you want to give him good-bye before he goes to work."

"I'll hurry, Aunt Maria, honest I will," the child promised and began to dress.

A little while later when she appeared in the big kitchen her father and Aunt Maria were already eating breakfast. With her hair drawn back into one uneven braid and a rusty brown dress upon her she seemed little like the adorable figure of the looking-glass, but her father's face lighted as he looked at her.

"So, Phœbe," he said, a teasing twinkle in his eyes, "I see you get up early to go to school."

"But I ain't glad to go." She refused to smile at his words.

"Ach, yes," he coaxed, "you be a good girl and like your new teacher. She's nice. I guess you'll like her when you know her once."

"Mebbe so," was the unpromising answer as she slipped the straps of a blue checked apron over her shoulders, buttoned it in the back and took her place at the table.

Breakfast at the Metz farm was no light meal. Between the early morning meal and the twelve o'clock dinner much hard work was generally accomplished and Maria Metz felt that a substantial foundation was necessary. Accordingly, she carried to the big, square cherry table in the kitchen an array of well-filled dishes. There was always a glass dish of stewed prunes or seasonable fresh fruit; a plate piled high with thick slices of home-made bread; several dishes of spreadings, as the jellies, preserves or apple-butter of that community are called. There was a generous square of home-made butter, a platter of home-cured ham or sausage, a dish of fried or creamed potatoes, a smaller dish of pickles or beets, and occasionally a dome of glistening cup cheese. The meal would have been considered incomplete without a liberal supply of cake or cookies, coffee in huge cups and yellow cream in an old-fashioned blue pitcher.

That morning Aunt Maria had prepared an extra treat, a platter of golden slices of fried mush.

The two older people partook heartily of the food before them but the child ate listlessly. Her aunt soon exclaimed, "Now, Phœbe, you must eat or you'll get hungry till recess. You know this is the first day of school and you can't run for a cookie if you get hungry. You ain't eatin'; you feel bad?"

"No, but I ain't hungry."

"Come now," urged her father, as he poured a liberal helping of molasses on his sixth piece of mush, "you must eat. You surely don't feel that bad about going to school!"

"Ach, pop," she burst out, "I don't hate the school part, the learnin' in books; that part is easy. But I don't like the teacher, and I guess she laughed at my tight braids. Mebbe if I dared wear curls—— Oh, pop, daren't I have curls? I'd like to show her that I look nice that way. Say I dare, then I won't be so funny lookin' no more!"

Jacob Metz looked at his offspring—what did the child mean? Why, he thought she was right sweet and surely her aunt kept her clean and tidy. But before he could answer his sister spoke authoritatively.

"Jacob, I wish you'd tell her once that she daren't have curls! She just plagues me all the time for 'em. Her hair was made to be kept back and not hangin' all over."

"Why then," Phœbe asked soberly, "did God make my hair curly if I daren't have curls?" She spoke with a sense of knowing that she had propounded an unanswerable question.

"That part don't matter," evaded Aunt Maria. "You ask your pop once how he wants you to have your hair fixed."

The child looked up expectantly but she read the answer in her father's face.

"I like your hair back in plaits, Phœbe. You look nice that way."

"Ach," her nose wrinkled in disgust, "not so very, I guess. Mary Warner has curls, always she has curls!"

"Come," said the father as he rose from his chair, "you be a good girl now to-day. I'm going now."

"All right, pop. I'll tell you to-night how I like the teacher."

After the breakfast dishes were washed and the other morning tasks accomplished Phœbe brought her comb and ribbons to her aunt and sat patiently on a spindle-legged kitchen chair while the woman carefully parted the long light hair and formed it into two braids, each tied at the end with a narrow brown ribbon.

"Now," Aunt Maria said as she unbuttoned the despised brown dress, "you dare put on your blue chambray dress if you take care and not get it dirty right aways."

"Oh, I'm glad for that. I like that dress best of all I have. It's not so long in the body or tight or long in the skirt like my other dresses. And blue is a prettier color than brown. I'll hurry now and get dressed."

She ran up the wide stairs, her hands skimming lightly the white hand-rail, and entered the little room known as the clothes-room, where the best clothes of the family were hung on heavy hooks fastened along the entire length of the four walls. She soon found the blue chambray dress. It was extremely simple. The plain gathered skirt was fastened to the full waist by a wide belt of the chambray. But the dress bore one distinctive feature. Instead of the usual narrow band around the neck it was adorned with a wide round collar which lay over the shoulders. Phœbe knew that the collar was vastly becoming and the knowledge always had a soothing effect upon her.

When the call of the school bell floated down the hill to the gray farmhouse Phœbe picked up her school bag and her tin lunch kettle and started off, outwardly in happier mood yet loath to go to the old schoolhouse for the first session of school.

From the Metz farm the road to the school began to ascend. Gradually it curved up-hill, then suddenly stretched out in a long, steep climb until, upon the summit of the hill, it curved sharply to the west to a wide clearing. It was to this clearing the little country schoolhouse with its wide porch and snug bell-tower called the children back to their studies.

Goldenrod and asters grew along the road, dogwood branches hung their scarlet berries over the edge of the woods, but Phœbe would have scorned to gather any of the flowers she loved and carry them to the new teacher. "I ain't bringing her any flowers," she soliloquized.

She trudged soberly ahead. As she reached the summit of the hill several children called to her. From three roads came other children, most of them carrying baskets or kettles filled with the noon lunch. All were eager for the opening of school, anxious to "see the new teacher once."

From the farm nearest the schoolhouse Phares Eby had come for his last year in the rural school. From the little cottage on the adjoining farm David Eby came whistling down the road.

"Hello, Phœbe," he called as he drew near to her. "Glad for school?"

"I ain't!" She flung the words at him. "You know good enough I ain't."

"Ha, ha," he laughed, "don't be cranky, Phœbe. Here comes Phares and he'll tell you that your eyes are black when you're cross. Won't you, Phares?"

"I——" began the sober youth, but Phœbe rudely interrupted.

"I don't care. I don't like the new teacher."

"You must like everybody," said Phares.

"Well, I just guess I won't! There's Mary Warner with her white dress and her black curls with a pink bow on them—you don't think I'm likin' her when she's got what I want and daren't have? Come on, it's time to go in," she added as Phares would have remonstrated with her for her frank avowal of jealousy. "Let's go in and see what the teacher's got on."

"Gee," whistled David, "girls are always thinking of clothes."

Phœbe gave him a disdainful look, but he laughed and walked by her side, up the three steps, across the porch and into the schoolhouse.

The red brick schoolhouse on the hill was a typical country school of Lancaster County. It had one large room with four rows of double desks and seats facing the teacher's desk and a long blackboard with its border of A B C. A stove stood in one of the corners in the front of the room. In the rear numerous hooks in the wall waited for the children's wraps and a low bench stood ready to receive their lunch baskets and kettles. Each detail of the little schoolhouse was reproduced in scores of other rural schools of that community. And yet, somehow, many of the older children felt on that first Monday a hope that their school would be different that year, that the teacher from Philadelphia would change many of the old ways and teach them, what Youth most desires, new ways, new manners, new things. It is only as the years bring wisdom that men and women appreciate the old things of life, as well as the new.

The new teacher became at once the predominating spirit of that little group. The interest of all the children, from the shy little beginners in the Primer class to the tall ones in the A class, was centered about her.

Miss Lee stood by her desk as Phœbe and the two boys entered. It was still that delightful period, before-school, when laughter could be released and voices raised without a fear of "keep quiet." The children moved to the teacher's desk as though drawn by magnetic force. Mary Warner, her dark curls hanging over her shoulders, appeared already acquainted with her. Several tiny beginners stood near the desk, a few older scholars were bravely offering their services to fetch water from Eby's "whenever it's all or you want some fresh," or else stay and clap the erasers clean.

When the second tug at the bell-rope gave the final call for the opening of school there was an air of gladness in the room. The new teacher possessed enough of the elusive "something" the country children felt belonged to a teacher from a big city like Philadelphia. The way she conducted the opening exercises, led the singing, and then proceeded with the business of arranging classes and assigning lessons served to intensify the first feelings of satisfaction. When recess came the children ran outdoors, ostensibly to play, but rather to gather into little groups and discuss the merits of the new teacher. The general verdict was, "She's all right."

"Ain't she all right?" David Eby asked Phœbe as they stood in the brown grasses near the school porch.

"Ach, don't ask me that so often!"

"But honest now, Phœbe, don't you like her?"

"I don't know."

"When will you know?"

"I don't know," came the tantalizing answer.

"Ach, sometimes, Phœbe, you make me mad! You act dumb just like the other girls sometimes."

"Then keep away from me if you don't like me," she retorted.

"Sassbox!" said the boy and walked away from her.

The little tilt with David did not improve the girl's humor. She entered the schoolroom with a sulky look on her face, her blue eyes dark and stormy. Accordingly, when Mary Warner shook her enviable curls and leaned forward to whisper ecstatically, "Phœbe, don't you just love the new teacher?" Phœbe replied very decidedly, "I do not! I don't like her at all!"

For a moment Mary held her breath, then a surprised "Oh!" came from her lips and she raised her hand and waved it frantically to attract the teacher's attention.

"What is it, Mary?"

"Why, Miss Lee, Phœbe Metz says she don't like you at all!"

"Did she ask you to tell me?" A faint flush crept into the face of the teacher.

"No—but——"

"Then that will do, Mary."

But Phœbe Metz did not dismiss the matter so easily. She turned in her seat and gave one of Mary's obnoxious curls a vigorous yank.

"Tattle-tale!" she hurled out madly. "Big tattle-tale!"

"Yank 'em again," whispered David, seated a few seats behind the girls, but Phares called out a soft, "Phœbe, stop that."

It all occurred in a moment—the yank, the outcry of Mary, the whispers of the two boys and the subsequent pause in the matter of teaching and the centering of every child's attention upon the exciting incident and wondering what Miss Lee would do with the disturbers of the peace.

"Phœbe," the teacher's voice was controlled and forceful, "you may fold your hands. You do not seem to know what to do with them."

Phœbe folded her hands and bowed her head in shame. She hadn't meant to create a disturbance. What would her father say when he knew she was scolded the first day of school!

The teacher's voice went on, "Mary Warner, you may come to me at noon. I want to tell you a few things about tale-bearing. Phœbe may remain after the others leave this afternoon."

"Kept in!" thought Phœbe disconsolately. She was going to be kept in the first day! Never before had such punishment been meted out to her! The disgrace almost overwhelmed her.

"Now I won't ever, ever, ever like her!" she thought as she bent her head to hide the tears.

The remainder of the day was like a blurred page to her. She was glad when the other children picked up their books and empty baskets and kettles and started homeward.

"Cheer up," whispered David as he passed out, but she was too miserable to smile or answer.

"Come on, David," urged Phares when the two cousins reached outdoors and the younger one seemed reluctant to go home. "Don't stay here to pet Phœbe when she comes out."

"Ach, the poor kid"—David was all sympathy and tenderness.

"Let her get punished. Pulling Mary's hair like that!"

"Well, Mary tattled. I was wishing Phœbe'd yank that darned kid's hair half off."

"Mary just told the truth. You think everything Phœbe does is right and you help her along in her temper. She needs to be punished sometimes."

"Ach, you make me tired, standing up for a tattle-tale! Anyhow, you go on home. I'm goin' to hang round a while and see if Miss Lee does anything mean."

Phares went on alone and the other boy stole to a window and crouched to the ground.

Inside the room Phœbe waited tremblingly for the teacher to speak. It seemed ages before Miss Lee walked down the aisle and stood by the low desk.

Phœbe raised her head—the look in the dark eyes of the teacher filled her with a sudden reversion of feeling. How could she go on hating any one so beautiful!

"Phœbe, I'm sorry—I'm so sorry there has been any trouble the first day and that you have been the cause of it."

"I—ach, Miss Lee," the child blurted out half-sobbingly, "Mary, she tattled on me."

"That was wrong, of course. I made her understand that at noon. But don't you think that pulling her hair and creating a disturbance was equally wrong?"

"I guess so, mebbe. But I didn't mean to make no fuss. I—I—why, I just get so mad still! I hadn't ought to pull her hair, for that hurts vonderful much."

"Then you might tell her to-morrow how sorry you are about it."

"Yes." Phœbe looked up at the lovely face of the teacher. She felt that some explanation of Mary's tale was necessary. "Why, now," she stammered, "you know—you know that Mary said I said I don't like you?"

"Yes."

"Why, this summer once, early in June it was"—the child hung her head and spoke almost inaudibly—"you laughed at me and called me a Little Dutchie!" She looked up bravely then and spoke faster, "And for that, it's just for that I don't like you like all the others do a'ready."

"Laughed at you!" Miss Lee was perplexed. "You must be mistaken."

But Phœbe shook her head resolutely and told the story of the pink rose. Miss Lee listened at first with an incredulous smile upon her face, then with dawning remembrance.

"You dear child!" she cried as Phœbe ended her quaint recital. "So you are the little girl of the sunbonnet and the rose! I thought this morning I had seen you before. But you don't understand! I didn't laugh at you in the way you think. Why, I laughed at you just as we laugh at a dear little baby, because we love it and because it is so dear and sweet. And Dutchie was just a pet name. Can't you understand? You were so quaint and interesting in your sunbonnet and with the pink rose pressed to your face. Can't you understand?"

Phœbe smiled radiantly, her face beaming with happiness.

"Ach, ain't that simple now of me, Miss Lee?" she said in her old-fashioned manner. "I was so dumb and thought you was makin' fun of me, and just for that all summer I was wishin' school would not start ever. And I was sayin' all the time I ain't goin' to like you. But now I do like you," she added softly.

"I am glad we understand each other, Phœbe."

Miss Lee was genuinely interested in the child, attracted by the charming personality of the country girl. Of the thirty children of that school she felt that Phœbe Metz, in spite of her old-fashioned dress and older-fashioned ways, was the preëminent figure. It would be a delight to teach a child whose face could light with so much animation.

"Now, Phœbe," she said, "since we understand each other and have become friends, gather your books and hurry home. Your mother may be anxious about you."

"Not my mother," Phœbe replied soberly. "I ain't got no mom. It's my Aunt Maria and my pop takes care of me. My mom's dead long a'ready. But I'm goin' now," she ended brightly before Miss Lee could answer. "And the road's all down-hill so it won't take me long."

So she gathered her books and kettle, said good-bye to Miss Lee and hurried from the schoolhouse. When she was fairly on the road she broke into her habit of soliloquy: "Ach, if she ain't the nicest lady! So pretty she is and so kind! She was vonderful kind after what I done. The teacher we had last year, now, he would 'a' slapped my hands with a ruler, he was awful for rulers! But she just looked at me and I was so sorry for bein' bad that I could 'a' cried. And when she touched my hands—her hands is soft like the milkweed silk we find still in the fall—I just had to like her. I like her now and I'm goin' to be a good girl for her and when I grow up I wish I'd be just like her, just esactly like her."

David Eby waited until he was certain no harm was coming to Phœbe. He heard her say, "Now I do like you" and knew that the matter was being settled satisfactorily. Relieved, yet ashamed of his eavesdropping, he ran down the road toward his home.

"That teacher's all right," he thought. "But Jimminy, girls is funny things!"

He went on, whistling, but stopped suddenly as he turned a curve in the road and saw Phares sitting on the grass in the shelter of a clump of bushes.

The older boy rose. "David," he said sternly, "you're spoiling Phœbe Metz with your petting and fooling around her. What for need you pity her when she gets kept in for being bad? She was bad!"

"She was not bad!" David defended staunchly. "That Mary Warner makes me sick. Phœbe's got some sense, anyhow, and she's not bad. There's nothing bad in her."

"Um," said Phares tauntingly, "mebbe you like her already and next you'll want her for your girl. You give her pink roses and you stay to lick the teacher for her if——"

But the sentence was never finished. At the first words David's eyes flashed, his hands doubled into hard fists and, as his cousin paid no heed to the warning, he struck out suddenly, then partially restraining his rage, he unclenched his right hand and gave Phares a smarting slap upon the mouth.

"I'll learn you," he growled, "to meddle in my business! You mind your own, d'ye hear?"

"Why"—Phares knew no words to answer the insult—"why, David," he stammered, wiping his smarting lips.

But his silence added fuel to the other's wrath.

"You butt in too much, that's what!" said David. "It's just like Phœbe says, you boss too much. I ain't going to take it no more from you."

"I—now—mebbe I do," admitted Phares.

At the words David's anger cooled. He laid a hand on the older boy's arm, as older men might have gripped hands in reconciliation. "Come on, Phares," he said in natural, friendly tones. "I hadn't ought to hit you. Let's forget all about it. You and me mustn't fight over Phœbe."

"That's so," agreed Phares, but both were thoughtful and silent as they went down the lane.

CHAPTER V

THE HEART OF A CHILD

Phœbe's aspiration to become like her teacher did not lessen as the days went on. Her profound admiration for Miss Lee developed into intense devotion, a devotion whose depth she carefully guarded from discovery.

To her father's interested questioning she answered a mere, "Why, I like her, for all, pop. She didn't laugh to make fun at me. I think she's nice." But secretly the little girl thought of her new teacher in the most extravagant superlatives. Her heart was experiencing its first "hero" worship; the poetic, imaginative soul of the child was attracted by the magnetic personality of Miss Lee. The teacher's smiles, mannerisms, dress, and above all, her English, were objects worthy of emulation, thought the child. At times Phœbe despaired of ever becoming like Miss Lee, then again she felt certain she had within her possibilities to become like the enviable, wonderful Virginia Lee. But she breathed to none her ambitions and hopes except at night as she knelt by her high old-fashioned bed and bent her head to say the prayer Aunt Maria had taught her in babyhood. Then to the prayer, "Now I lay me down to sleep," she added an original petition, "And please let me get like my teacher, Miss Lee. Amen."

"Aunt Maria, church is on the hill Sunday, ain't it?" she asked one day after several weeks of school.

"Yes. And I hope it's nice, for we make ready for a lot of company always when we have church here."

"Why," the child asked eagerly, "dare I ask Miss Lee to come here for dinner too that Sunday? Mary Warner's mom had her for dinner last Sunday."

"Ach, yes, I don't care. You ask her. Mebbe she ain't been in a plain church yet and would like to go with us and then come home for dinner here. You ask her once."

Phœbe trembled a bit as she invited the teacher to the gray farmhouse. "Miss Lee—why—we have church here on the hill this Sunday and Aunt Maria thought perhaps you'd like to come out and go with us and then come to our house for dinner. We always have a lot of people for dinner."

"I'd love to, Phœbe, thank you," answered Miss Lee.

The plain sects of that community were all novel to her. She was eager to attend a service in the meeting-house on the hill and especially eager to meet Phœbe's people and study the unusual child in the intimate circle of home.

"Tell your aunt I shall be very glad to go to the service with you," she said as Phœbe stood speechless with joy. "Will you go?"

"Ach, yes, I go always," with a surprised widening of the blue eyes.

"And your aunt, too?"

"Why be sure, yes! Abody don't stay home from church when it's so near. That would look like we don't want company. There's church on the hill only every six weeks and the other Sundays it's at other churches. Then we drive to those other churches and people what live near ask us to come to their house for dinner, and we go. Then when it's here on the hill we must ask people that live far off to come to us for dinner. That way everybody has a place to go. It makes it nice to go away and to have company still. We always have a lot when church is here. Aunt Maria cooks so good."

She spoke the last words innocently and looked up with an expression of wonder as she heard Miss Lee laugh gaily—now what was funny? Surely Miss Lee laughed when there was nothing at all to laugh about!

"What time does your service begin?" asked the teacher. "What time do you leave the house?"

"It takes in at nine o'clock——"

Miss Lee smothered an ejaculation of surprise.

"But we leave the house a little after half-past eight. Then we can go easy up the hill and have time to walk around on the graveyard a little and get in church early and watch the people come in."

"I'll stop for you and go with you, Phœbe."

Sunday morning at the Metz farm was no time for prolonged slumber. With the first crowing of roosters Aunt Maria rose. After the early breakfast there were numerous tasks to be performed before the departure for the meeting-house. There was the milking to be done and the cans of milk placed in the cool spring-house; the chickens and cattle to be fed; each room of the big house to be dusted; vegetables to be prepared for a hasty boiling after the return from the service; preserves and canned fruits to be brought from the cellar, placed into glass dishes and set in readiness.

At eight-fifteen Phœbe was ready. She wore her favorite blue chambray dress and delighted in the fact that Sunday always brought her the privilege of wearing her hat. The little sailor hat with its narrow ribbon and little bow was certainly not the hat she would have chosen if she might have had that pleasure, but it was the only hat she owned, so was not to be despised. She felt grateful that Aunt Maria allowed her to wear a hat. Many little girls, some smaller than she, came to church every Sunday wearing silk bonnets like their elders!—she felt grateful for her hat—any hat!

Tugging at the elastic under her chin, then smoothing her handkerchief and placing it in her sleeve—she had seen Miss Lee dispose of a handkerchief in that way—she walked to the little green gate and watched the road leading from Greenwald.

Her heart leaped when she saw the teacher come down the long road. She opened the gate to go to meet her, then suddenly stood still. Miss Lee as she appeared in the schoolroom, in white linen dress or trim serge skirt and tailored waist, was attractive enough to cause Phœbe's heart to flutter with admiration a dozen times a day; but Miss Lee in Sunday morning church attire was so irresistibly sweet that the vision sent the little girl's heart pounding and caused a strange shyness to possess her. The semi-tailored dress of dark blue taffeta, the sheer white collar, the small black hat with its white wings, the silver coin purse in the gloved hand—no detail escaped the keen eyes of the child. She looked down at her cotton dress—it had seemed so pretty just a moment ago. But, of course, such dresses and gloves and hats were for grown-ups! "But just you wait," she thought, "when I grow up I'll look like that, too, see if I don't!"

Miss Lee, smiling, never knew the depths she stirred in the heart of the little girl.

"Am I late, Phœbe?"

"Ach, no. Just on time. Pop, he went a'ready, though. He goes early still to open the meeting-house. We'll go right away, as soon as Aunt Maria locks up. But what for did you bring a pocketbook?"

"For the offering."

"Offering?"

"The church offering, Phœbe. Surely you know what that is if you go to church every Sunday. Don't you have collection plates or baskets passed about in your church for everybody to put their offerings on them?"

"Why, no, we don't have that in our church! What for do they do that in any church?"

"To pay the preachers' salaries and——"

"Goodness," Phœbe laughed, "it would take a vonderful lot to pay all the preachers that preach at our church. Sometimes three or four preach at one meeting. They have to work week-days and get their money just like other men do. Men come around to the house sometimes for money for the poor, and when the meeting-house needs a new roof or something like that, everybody helps to pay for it, but we don't take no collections in church, like you say. That's a funny way——"

The appearance of Maria Metz prevented further discussion of church collections. With a large, fringed shawl pinned over her plain gray dress and a stiff black silk bonnet tied under her chin, she was ready for church. She was putting the big iron key of the kitchen door into a deep pocket of her full skirt as she came down the walk.

"That way, now we're ready," she said affably. "I guess you're Phœbe's teacher, ain't? I see you go past still."

"Yes. I am very glad to meet you, Miss Metz. It is very kind of you to invite me to go with you."

"Ach, that's nothing. You're welcome enough. We always have much company when church is on the hill. This is a nice day, so I guess church will be full. I hope so, anyway, for I got ready for company for dinner. But how do you like Greenwald?"

"Very well, indeed. It is beautiful here."

"Ain't! But I guess it's different from Phildelphy. I was there once, in the Centennial, and it was so full everywheres. I like the country best. Can't anything beat this now, can it?"

They reached the summit of the hill and paused.

"No," said Miss Lee, "this is hard to beat. I love the view from this hill."

"Ain't now"—Aunt Maria smiled in approval—"this here is about the nicest spot around Greenwald. There's the town so plain you could almost count the houses, only the trees get in the road. And there's the reservoir with the white fence around, and the farms and the pretty country around them—it's a pretty place."

"I like this hill," said Phœbe. "When I grow up I'm goin' to have a farm on this hill, when I'm married, I mean."

"That's too far off yet, Phœbe," said her aunt. "You must eat bread and butter yet a while before you think of such things."

"Anyhow, I changed my mind. I'm not goin' to live in the country when I grow up; I'm going to be a fine lady and live in the city."

"Phœbe, stop that dumb talk, now!" reproved her aunt sternly. "You turn round and walk up the hill. We'll go on now, Miss Lee. Mebbe you'd like to go on the graveyard a little?"

"I don't mind."

"Then come." Aunt Maria led the way, past the low brick meeting-house, through the gateway into the old burial ground. They wandered among the marble slabs and read the inscriptions, some half obliterated by years of mountain storms, others freshly carved.

"The epitaphs are interesting," said Miss Lee.

"What's them?" asked Phœbe.

"The verses on the tombstones. Here is one"—she read the inscription on the base of a narrow gray stone—"'After life's fitful fever she sleeps well.'"

"Ach," Aunt Maria said tartly, "I guess her man knowed why he put that on. That poor woman had three husbands and eleven children, so I guess she had fitful fever enough."

Phœbe laughed loud as she saw the smile on the face of her teacher, but next moment she sobered under the chiding of Aunt Maria. "Phœbe, now you keep quiet! Abody don't laugh and act so on a graveyard!"

"Ugh," the child said a moment later, "Miss Lee, just read this one. It always gives me shivers when I read it still.

"'Remember, man, as you pass by,
What you are now that once was I.
What I am now that you will be;
Prepare for death and follow me.'"

"That is rather startling," said Miss Lee.

Phœbe smiled and asked, "Don't you think this is a pretty graveyard?"

"Yes. How well cared for the graves are. Not a weed on most of them."

"Well," Aunt Maria explained, "the people who have dead here mostly take care of the graves. We come up every two weeks or so and sometimes we bring a hoe and fix our graves up nice and even. But some people are too lazy to keep the graves clean. I hoed some pig-ears out a few graves last week; I was ashamed of 'em, even if the graves didn't belong to us."

In the corner near the road the aunt stopped before a plain gray boulder.

"Phœbe's mom," she said, pointing to the inscription.

"PHŒBE
beloved wife of
Jacob Metz
aged twenty-two years
and one month.
Souls of the righteous
are in the hand of God."

"I'm glad," said the child as they stood by her mother's grave, "that they put that last on, for when I come here still I like to know that my mom ain't under all this dirt but that she's up in the Good Place like it says there."

Miss Lee clasped the little hand in hers—what words were adequate to express her feeling for the motherless child!

"Come on," Maria Metz said crisply, "or we'll be late." But Miss Lee read in the brusqueness a strong feeling of sorrow for the child.

Silently the three walked through the green aisles of the old graveyard, Aunt Maria leading the way, alone; Phœbe's hand still in the hand of her teacher.

To Miss Lee, whose hours of public worship had hitherto been spent in an Episcopal church in Philadelphia, the extreme plainness of the meeting-house on the hill brought a sense of acute wonderment. The contrast was so marked. There, in the city, was the large, high-vaulted church whose in-streaming light was softened by exquisite stained windows and revealed each detail of construction and color harmoniously consistent. Here, in the country, was the square, low-ceilinged meeting-house through whose open windows the glaring light relentlessly intensified the whiteness of the walls and revealed more plainly each flaw and knot in the unpainted pine benches. Yet the meeting-house on the hill was strangely, strongly representative of the frank, honest, unpretentious people who worshipped there, and after the first wave of surprise a feeling of interest and reverence held her.

It was a unique sight for the city girl. The rows of white-capped women were separated from the rows of bearded men by a low partition built midway down the body of the church. Each sex entered the meeting-house through a different door and sat in its apportioned half of the building. On each side of the room rows of black hooks were set into the walls. On these hooks the sisters hung their bonnets and the shawls and the brethren placed their hats and overcoats during the service.

The preachers, varying in number from two to six, sat before a long table in the front part of the meeting-house. When the duty of preaching devolved upon one of them he simply rose from his seat and delivered his message.

As Aunt Maria and her two followers took their seats on a bench near the front of the church a preacher rose.

"Let us join in singing—has any one a choice?"

Miss Lee started as a woman's voice answered, "Number one hundred forty-seven." However, her surprise merged into other emotions as the old hymn rose in the low-ceilinged room. There was no accompaniment of any musical instrument, just a harmonious blending of the deep-toned voices of the brethren with the sweet voices of the sisters. The music swelled in full, deliberate rhythm, its calm earnestness bearing witness to the fact that every word of the hymn was uttered in a spirit of worship.

Maria Metz sang very softly, but Phœbe's young voice rose clearly in the familiar words, "Jesus, Lover of my soul."

Miss Lee listened a moment to the sweet voice of the child by her side, then she, too, joined in the singing—feeling the words, as she had never before felt them, to be the true expression of millions of mortals who have sung, are singing, and shall continue to sing them.

When the hymn was ended another preacher arose and opened the service with a few remarks, then asked all to kneel in prayer.

Every one—men, women, children—turned and knelt upon the bare floor while the preacher's voice rose in a simple prayer. As the Amen fell from his lips Miss Lee started to rise, but Phœbe laid a restraining hand upon her and whispered, "There's yet one."

For a moment there was silence in the meeting-house. Then the voice of another preacher rose in the universal prayer, "Our Father, which art in heaven." Every extemporaneous prayer in the Church of the Brethren is complemented by the model prayer the Master taught His disciples.

There was another hymn, reading of the Scriptures, and then the sermon proper was preached.

Aunt Maria nodded approvingly as the preacher read, "Whose adorning let it not be that outward adorning of plaiting the hair, and of wearing of gold, or of putting on of apparel; but let it be the hidden man of the heart, in that which is not corruptible, even the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of God of great price."

"You listen good now to what the preacher says," the woman whispered to Phœbe.

The child looked Up solemnly at her aunt, about her at the many white-capped women, then up at Miss Lee's pretty hat with its white Mercury wings—she was endeavoring to justify the pleasure and beauty her aunt pronounced vanity. Was Miss Lee really wicked when she wore clothes like that? Surely, no! After a few moments the child sighed, folded her hands and looked steadfastly at the tall bearded man who was preaching.

The clergy among these plain sects receive no remuneration for their preaching. With them the mercenary and the pecuniary are ever distinct from the religious. Six days in the week the preacher follows the plow or works at some other worthy occupation; upon the seventh day he preaches the Gospel. There is, therefore, no elaborate preparation for the sermon; the preacher has abundant faith in the old admonition, "Take no thought how or what ye shall speak, for it shall be given you in that same hour what ye shall speak, for it is not ye that speak but the spirit of the Father that speaketh in you." Thus it is that, while the sermons usually lack the blandishments of fine rhetoric and the rhythmic ease arising from oratorical ability, they seldom fail in deep sincerity and directness of appeal.

The one who delivered the message that September morning told of the joy of those who have overcome the desire for the vanities of the world, extolled the virtue of a simple life, till Miss Lee felt convinced that there must be something real in a religion that could hold its followers to so simple, wholesome a life.

She looked about, at the serried rows of white-capped women—how gentle and calm they appeared in their white caps and plain dresses; she looked across the partition at the lines of men—how strong and honest their faces were; and the children—she had never before seen so many children at a church service—would they all, in time, wear the garb of their people and enter the church of their parents? The child at her side—vivacious, untiring, responsive Phœbe—would she, too, wear the plain dress some day and live the quiet life of her people?

The eagerness of the child's face as Miss Lee looked at her denoted intense interest in the sermon, but none could know the real cause of that eagerness.

"I won't, I just won't dress plain!" she was thinking. "Anyway, not till I'm old like Aunt Maria. I want to look like Miss Lee when I grow up. And that preacher just said that it ain't good to plait the hair, I mean he read it out the Bible. Mebbe now Aunt Maria will leave me have curls. I hope she heard him say that."

She sighed in relief as the sermon was concluded and the next preacher rose and added a few remarks. When the third man rose to add his few remarks Phœbe looked up at Miss Lee and whispered, "Guess he's the last one once!"

Miss Lee smiled. The service was rather long, but it was drawing to a close. There was another prayer, another hymn and the service ended.

Immediately the white-capped women rose and began to bestow upon each other the holy kiss; upon the opposite side of the church the brethren greeted each other in like fashion. Everywhere there were greetings and profferings of dinner invitations.

Maria Metz and her brother did not fail in their duty. In a few minutes they had invited a goodly number to make the gray farmhouse their stopping-place. Then Aunt Maria hurried home, eager to prepare for her guests. Soon the Metz barnyard was filled with carriages and automobiles and the gray house resounded with happy voices. Some of the women helped Maria in the kitchen, others wandered about in the old-fashioned garden, where dahlias, sweet alyssum, marigolds, ladies' breastpin and snapdragons still bloomed in the bright September sunshine.

Miss Lee, guided by Phœbe, examined every nook of the big garden, peered into the deserted wren-house and listened to the child's story of the six baby wrens reared in the box that summer. Finally Phœbe suggested sitting on a bench half screened by rose-bushes and honeysuckle. There, in that green spot, Miss Lee tactfully coaxed the child to unfold her charming personality, all serenely unconscious of the fact that inside the gray house the white-capped women were discussing the new teacher as they prepared the dinner.

"She seems vonderful nice and common," volunteered Aunt Maria. "Not stuck up, for a Phildelphy lady."

"Well, why should she be stuck up?" argued one. "Ain't she just Mollie Stern's cousin? Course, Mollie's nice, but nothing tony."

"Anyhow, the children all like her," spoke up another woman. "My Enos learns good this year."

"I guess she's all right," said another, "but Amande, my sister, says that she's after her Lizzie all the time for the way she talks. The teacher tells her all the time not to talk so funny, not to get her t's and d's and her v's and w's mixed. Goodness knows, them letters is near enough alike to get them mixed sometimes. I mix them myself. Manda don't want her Lizzie made high-toned, for then nothing will be good enough for her any more."

"Ach, I guess Miss Lee won't do that," said Aunt Maria. "I know I'm glad the teacher ain't the kind to put on airs. When I heard they put in a teacher from Phildelphy I was afraid she'd be the kind to teach the children a lot of dumb notions and that Phœbe would be spoiled—— Here, Sister Minnich, is the holder for that pan. I guess the ham is fried enough. Yes, ain't the chicken smells good! I roasted it yesterday, so it needs just a good heating to-day."

"Shall I take the sweet potatoes off, Maria?"

"Yes, they're brown enough, and the coffee's about done, and plenty of it, too."

"And it smells good, too," chorused several women.

"It's just twenty-eight cent coffee; I get it in Greenwald. I guess the things can be put out now. Call the men, Susan."

In quick order the long table in the dining-room—used only upon occasions like this—was filled with smoking, savory dishes, the men called from the porches and yard and everybody, except the two women who helped Aunt Maria to serve, seated about the board. All heads were bowed while one of the brethren said a long grace and then the feast began.

True to the standards set by the majority of the Pennsylvania Dutch, the meal was fit for the finest. There was no attempt to serve it according to the rules of the latest book of etiquette. All the food was placed upon the table and each one helped herself and himself and passed the dish to the nearest neighbor. Occasionally the services of the three women were required to bring in water, bread or coffee, or to replenish the dishes and platters. Everybody was in good humor, especially when one of the brethren suddenly found himself with a platter of chicken in one hand and a pitcher of gravy in the other.

"Hold on, here!" he said laughingly, "it's coming both ways. I can't manage it."

"Now, Isaac," chided one of the women, "you went and started the gravy the wrong way around. And here, Elam, start that apple-butter round once. Maria always has such good apple-butter."

Miss Lee's ready adaptability proved a valuable asset that day. Everybody was so cordial and friendly that, although she was the only woman without the white cap, there was no shadow of any holier-than-thou spirit. She was accepted as a friend; as a lady from Philadelphia she became invested with a charm and interest which the frank country people did not try to conceal. They spoke freely to her of her work in the school, inquired about the children and listened with interest as she answered their questions about her home city.

When the dinner was ended heads were bowed again and thanks rendered to God for the blessings received. Then the men went outdoors, where the beehives, poultry houses, barns and orchards of the farm afforded several hours of inspection and discussion.

Indoors some of the women began to wash dishes while Aunt Maria and her helpers ate their belated dinner; others went to the sitting-room and entertained themselves by rocking and talking or looking at the pictures in the big red plush album which lay upon a small table.

Later, when everything was once more in order in the big kitchen, Maria stood in the doorway of the sitting-room.

"Now," she said, "I guess we better go up-stairs and see the rugs before the men come in. Susan said she wants to see my new rugs once when she comes. So come on, everybody that wants to."

"You come," Phœbe invited Miss Lee. "I'll show you some of the things in my chest."

Maria led the way to the spare-room on the second floor, a large square room furnished in old-fashioned country style: a rag carpet, rag rugs, heavy black walnut bureau and wash-stand, the latter with an antique bowl and pitcher of pink and white, and a splasher of white linen outlined in turkey red cotton. A framed cross-stitch sampler hung on the wall; four cane-seated chairs and a great wooden chest completed the furnishing of the room.

The chest became the centre of attraction as Aunt Maria opened it and began to show the hooked rugs she had made.

Phœbe waited until her teacher had seen and admired several, then she tugged at the silk sleeve ever so gently and whispered, "D'ye want to see some of the things I made?"

Miss Lee smiled and nodded and the two stole away to the child's room.

Phœbe closed the door.

"This is my room and this is my Hope Chest," she said proudly.

Among many of the Pennsylvania Dutch the Hope Chest has long been considered an important part of a girl's belongings. During her early childhood a large chest is secured and the stocking of it becomes a pleasant duty. Into it are laid the girl's discarded infant clothes; patchwork quilts and comfortables pieced by herself or by some fond grandmother or mother or aunt; homespun sheets and towels that have been handed down from other generations; ginghams, linens and minor household articles that might be useful in her own home. When the girl leaves the old nest for one of her own building the Hope Chest goes with her as a valuable portion of her dowry.

"Hope Chest," echoed Miss Lee. "Do you have a Hope Chest?"

"Ach, yes, long already! Aunt Maria says it's for when I grow up and get married and live in my own home, but I—why, I don't know at all yet if I want to get married. When I say that to her she says still that I can be glad I have the chest anyhow, for old maids need covers and aprons and things too."

"You dear child," Miss Lee said, laughing, "you do say the funniest things!"

"But"—Phœbe raised her flushed face—"you ain't laughing at me to make fun?"

"Oh, Phœbe, I love you too much for that. It's just that you are different."

"Ach, but I'm glad! And that's why I want to show you my things."

She opened the lid of her chest and brought out a quilt, then another, and another.

"This is all mine. And I finished another one this summer that Aunt Maria is going to quilt this fall yet. Then I'll have nine already. Ain't—isn't that a lot?"

"Yes, indeed," laughed the teacher. "Just nine more than I have."

"Why"—Phœbe stared in surprise—"don't you have quilts in your Hope Chest?"

"I haven't even the Hope Chest."

"No Hope Chest! Now, that's funny! I thought every girl that could have a chest for the money had a Hope Chest!"

"I never heard of a Hope Chest before I came to Greenwald."

"Now don't it beat all!" The child was very serious. "We ain't at all like other people, I believe. I wonder why we are so different from you people. Oh, I know we talk different from you, and mostly look different from you and I guess we do things a lot different from you—do you think, Miss Lee, oh, do you think that I could ever get like you?"

"Yes——" Miss Lee showed hesitancy.

"For sure?" Phœbe asked, quick to note the slight delay in the answer.

"Yes, I am sure you could, dear. You can learn to dress, speak and act as people do in the great cities—but are you sure that you want to do so?"

"Want to! Why, I want to so bad that it hurts! I don't want to just go to country school and Greenwald High School and then live on a farm all the rest of my life and never get anywhere but to the store in Greenwald, to Lancaster several times a year, and to church every Sunday. I want to do some things other people in the other parts of the country do, that's what I want. I'd like best of all to be a great singer and to look and dress and talk like you. I can sing good, pop says I can."

"I have noticed you have a sweet voice."

"Ain't!" The child's voice rang with gladness. "I'm so glad I have. And David, he's glad too, for he says that he thinks it's a gift from God to have a voice that can sing as nice as the birds. David and Phares are just like my brothers. David's mom is awful nice. I like her"—she whispered—"I like her almost better than my Aunt Maria because she's so—ach, you know what I mean! She's so much like my own mom would be. I like David better than Phares, too, because Phares bosses me too much and he is wonderful strict and thinks everything is bad or foolish. He preaches a lot. He says it's bad to be a big singer and sing for the people and get money for it, in oprays, he means—is it?"

Miss Lee was startled by the ambition of the child before her and amazed at the determination revealed in her young pupil. Before she could answer wisely Phœbe went on:

"Now David says still I could be a big opray singer some day mebbe, and he don't think it's bad. I think still that singin' is about like havin' curls—if God don't want you to use your singin' and your curls what did He give 'em to you for?"

Much to the teacher's relief she was spared the difficulty of answering the child. The aunt was bringing the visitors to Phœbe's room.

"Come in and see my things," Phœbe invited cordially, as though curls and operatic careers had never troubled her. In the excitement of displaying her quilts she apparently forgot the vital problems she had so lately discussed. But Miss Lee made a mental comment as she stood apart and watched the child among the white-capped women, "That little girl will do things before she settles into the simple, monotonous life these women lead."

CHAPTER VI

THE PRIMA DONNA OF THE ATTIC

"Aunt Maria, dare I go without sewing just this one Saturday?"

It was Saturday afternoon in early October. All the week-end work of the farmhouse was done: the walks and porches scrubbed, the entire house cleaned, the shelves in the cellar filled with pies and cakes. Maria Metz stood by the wooden frame in which she had sewed Phœbe's latest quilt and chalked lines and half-moons upon the calico, preliminary to the actual work of quilting.

Phœbe's face was eloquent as her aunt turned and looked down.

"Why?" asked the woman calmly.

"Ach, because it's my birthday, eleven I am to-day. And pop's going to bring me new hair-ribbons from Greenwald, pretty blue ones, I asked him to bring, and nice and wide"—she opened her hands in imaginary picturing of the width of the new ribbons—"but most of all," she hastened to add as she saw an expression of displeasure on her aunt's face, "I'd like to have a party all to myself. I thought that so long as you're going to have women in to help you quilt, and that is like a party, only you don't call it so, why I could have a party for me alone. I'd like to play all afternoon instead of sewing first like I do still. Dare I, I mean may I?"—in conscientious endeavor to speak as Miss Lee was trying to teach her.

Maria Metz smiled at the little girl's idea of a party, and after a moment's hesitation replied, "Ach, yes well, Phœbe, I don't care."

"In the garret, oh, dare I go in the garret and play?" she asked excitedly.

"Yes, I guess. If you put everything away nice when you are done playin'."

"I will."

She started off gleefully.

"And be careful of the steps. I'm always afraid you'll fall down when you go up there, the steps are so narrow."

"Ach, I won't fall. I'll be careful. I'll play a while and then shall I help to quilt?" she offered magnanimously in return for the privilege of playing in the garret.

"No, I don't need you. But you can quilt nice, too. The last time you took littler stitches than Lizzie from the Home, but she don't see so good. But you needn't help to-day, for so many can't get round the frame good. Phares's mom and David's mom and Lyddy and Granny Hogendobler and Susan are comin', and that's enough for one quilt. You go play."

In a moment Phœbe was off, up the broad stairs to the second floor. There she paused for breath—"Oh, it's like going to a castle somewhere in a strange country, goin' to the garret! I'm always a little scared at first, goin' to the garret."

With a laugh she turned into a small room, opened a latched door, closed it securely behind her, and stood upon the lower step of the attic stairs. She looked about a moment. Above her were the stained rafters of the attic, where a dim light invested it with a strange, half fearful interest.

"Ach, now, don't be a baby," she admonished herself. "Go right up the stairs. You're a queen—no, I know!—You're a primer donner going up the platform steps to sing!"

With that helpful delusion she started bravely up the stairs and never paused until she reached the top step. She ran to a small window and threw it wide open so that the October sunshine could stream in and make the place less ghostly.

"Now it's fine up here," she cried. "And I dare—I may—talk to myself all I want. Aunt Maria says it's simple to talk to yourself, but goodness, when abody has no other boys or girls to talk to half the time like I don't, what else can abody do but talk to your own self? Anyhow, I'm up here now and dare talk out loud all I want. I'll hunt first for robbers."

She ran about the big attic, peered behind every old trunk and box, even inside an old yellow cupboard, though she knew it was filled with old school-books and older hymn-books.

"Not a robber here, less he's back under the eaves."

She crept into the low nook under the slanting roof but found nothing more exciting than a spider. "Huh, it's no fun hunting for robbers. Guess I'll spin a while."

With quick variability she drew a low stool near an old spinning-wheel, placed her foot on the slender treadle and twisted the golden flax in imitation of the way Aunt Maria had once taught her.

"I'll weave a new dress for myself—oh, goody!" she cried, springing from the stool. "Now I know what I'll do! I'll dress up in the old clothes in that old trunk! That'll be the very best party I can have."

She skipped to a far corner of the attic, where a long, leather-covered trunk stood among some boxes. In a moment the clasps were unfastened, the lid raised, a protecting cloth lifted from the top and the contents of the trunk exposed.

The child, kneeling before the trunk, clasped her hands and uttered an ecstatic, "Oh, I'll be a primer donner now! I remember there used to be a wonderful fine dress in here somewhere."

With childish feverishness, yet with tenderness and reverence for the relics of a long dead past, she lifted the old garments from the trunk.

"The baby clothes my mom wore—my mother, Miss Lee always says, and I like that name better, too. My, but they're little! Such tweeny, weeny sleeves! I wonder how a baby ever got into anything so tiny. I bet she was cunning—Miss Lee says babies are cunning. And here's the dress and cap and a pair of white woolen stockings I wore. Aunt Maria told me so the last time we cleaned house and I helped to carry all these things down-stairs and hang them out in the air so they don't spoil here in the trunk all locked up tight. I wish I could see how I looked when I wore these things. I wonder if I was a nice baby—but, ach, all babies are nice. I could squeeze every one I see, only when they're not clean I'd want to wash 'em first. And here's my mom—mother's wedding dress, a gray silk one. Ain't it too bad, now, it's going in holes! And this satin jacket Aunt Maria said my grandpap wore at his wedding; it has a silver buckle at the neck in front. And next comes the dress I like. It was my mother's mother's, and it's awful old. But I think it's fine, with the little pink rosebuds and the lace shawl round the neck and the long skirt. That's the dress I must wear now to play I'm a primer donner."

She held out the old-fashioned pink-sprigged muslin, yellowed with age, yet possessing the charm of old, well-preserved garments. The short, puffed sleeves, lace fichu and full, puffed skirt proclaimed it of a bygone generation.

"It's pretty," the child exulted as she shook out the soft folds. "Guess I can slip it on over my other dress, it's plenty big. It must button in the front, for that's the way the lace shawl goes. Um—it's long"—she looked down as she fastened the last little button. "Oh, I know! I'll tuck it up in the front and leave the long back for a trail! How's that, I wonder."

She unearthed an old mirror, hung it on a nail in the wall and surveyed herself in the glass.

"Um, I don't look so bad—but my hair ain't right. I don't know how primer donners wear their hair, but I know they don't wear it in two plaits like mine."

She pulled the narrow brown ribbons from her braids, opened the braids and shook her head vigorously until her curls tumbled about her head and over her shoulders. Then she knotted the two ribbons together and bound them across her hair in a fillet, tying them in a bow under her flowing curls.

"Now, I guess it's as good as I can fix it. I wish Miss Lee could see me now. I wish most of all my mom—mother could see me. Mebbe she'd say, 'Precious child,' like they say in stories, and then I'd say back, 'Mother dear, mother dear'"—she lingered over the words—"'Mother dear.' But mebbe she is saying that to me right now, seeing it's my birthday. I'll make believe so, anyhow."

She was silent for a moment, a puzzled expression on her face.

"I just don't see," she spoke aloud suddenly, "I don't see why I shouldn't make believe I have a mother, just adopt one like people do children sometimes. Aunt Maria says it's a risk to adopt some one's child, but I don't see that it would be a risk to adopt a mother. Let me see now—of all the women I know, who do I want to adopt? Not Mary Warner's mom—she's stylish and wears nice dresses, but I don't think I'd like her to keep. Not Granny Hogendobler, though she's nice and I like her a lot, a whole lot, and I wish her Nason would come back, but I don't see how I could take her for my mother; she's too old and she don't wear a white cap and my mother did, so I must take one that does. I don't want Phares's mom, either. Now, David's mom I like—yes, I like her. Most everybody calls her Aunty Bab and I'm just goin' to ask her if I dare call her Mother Bab! Mother Bab—I like that vonderful much! And I like her. When we go over to her house she's so nice and talks to me kind and the last time I was there she kissed me and said what pretty hair I got. Yes, I want David's mom for mine. I guess he won't care. He always gives me apples and chestnuts and things and he shows me birds' nests and I think he'll leave me have his mom, so long as he can have her too. I'll ask him once when I see him. I wonder who's goin' on the road to Greenwald."

She gathered up her long skirt and stepped grandly across the bare floor of the attic. As she stood by the window a boyish whistle floated up to her. She leaned over the narrow sill and peered through the evergreen trees at the road.

"That's David now, I bet! Sounds like his whistle. Oo-oo, David," she called as the boy came swinging down the road.

"Hello, Phœbe. Where you at?"

He turned in at the gate and looked around.

"Whew," he whistled as he glanced up and saw her at the little window of the attic. "What you doing up there?"

"Playin' primer donner. I just look something grand. Wait, I'll come down."

"Sure, come on down and let me see you. I'm going to hang around a while. Mom's here quilting, ain't she?"

"Sh!" Phœbe raised a warning finger, then placed her hands to her mouth to shut the sound of her voice from the people in the gray house. "You sneak round to the kitchen door, to the back one, so they can't hear you, and I'll come down. Aunt Maria mightn't like my hair and dress, and I don't want to make her cross on my birthday. Be careful, don't make no noise."

"Ha," laughed the boy. "Bet you're sneaking things, you little rascal."

Phœbe lifted her finger, shook her head, then smiled and turned from the window. She tiptoed down the dark attic stairs, then down the narrow back stairs to the kitchen and slipped quietly to the little porch at the very rear of the house.

"Gee whiz!" exclaimed David. "You're a swell in that dress!"

"Ain't I—I mean am I—ach, David, it's hard sometimes to talk like Miss Lee says we should."

"Where'd you get the dress, Phœbe?"

"Up in the garret. Aunt Maria said I dare go up and play 'cause it's my birthday."

"Hold on, that's just what I came for, to pull your ears."

"No you don't," she said crossly. "No you don't, David Eby, pull my ears." She clapped a hand upon each ear.

"Then I'll pull a curl," he said and suited the action to the word. He took one of the long light curls and pulled it gently, yet with a brusque show of savagery and strength—"One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, and one to make you grow. Now who says I can't celebrate your birthday!"

"You're mean, awful mean, David Eby!" She tossed her head in anger. But a moment later she relented as she saw him smile. "Ach," she said in friendly tone, "I don't care if you pull my curls. It didn't hurt anyhow. You can't do it again for a whole year. But don't you think I look like a primer donner, David?"

"Oh, say it right! How can you expect to ever be what you can't pronounce? It's pri-ma-don-na."

"Pri-ma-don-na," she repeated, shaking her curls at every syllable. "Do I look like a prima donna?"

"Yes, all but your face."

"My face—why"—she faltered—"what's wrong with my face? Ain't it pretty enough to be a prima donna?"

"Funny kid," he laughed. "Your face is good enough for a prima donna, but to be a real prima donna you must fix it up with cold cream, paint and powder."

"Powder!" she echoed in amazement. "Not the kind you put in guns?"

"Gee, no! It's white stuff—looks like flour; mebbe it is flour fixed up with perfume. Mary Warner had some at school last week and showed some of the girls at recess how to put it on. I was behind a tree and saw them but they didn't see me."

"I thought some of the girls looked pale—so that was what made them look so white! But how do you know all about fixing up to be a prima donna? Where did you learn?" She looked at him admiringly, justly appreciating his superior knowledge.

"Oh, when I had the mumps last winter I used to read the papers every day, clean through. There was a column called the 'Hints to Beauty' column, and sometimes I read it just for fun, it was so funny. It told about fixing up the face and mentioned a famous singer and some other people who always looked beautiful because they knew how to fix their faces to keep looking young. But I wouldn't like to see any one I like fix their faces like it said, for all that stuff——"

"But do you think all prima donnas put such things on their faces?" she interrupted him.

"Guess so."

"What was it, Davie?"

"Cold cream, paint, powder—here, where are you going?" he asked as she started for the door.

"I'll be out in a minute; you wait here for me."

"Cold cream, paint, powder," she repeated as she closed the door and left David outside. "Cream's all in the cellar." She took a pewter tablespoon from a drawer, opened a latched door in the kitchen and went noiselessly down the steps to the cellar. There she lifted the lid from a large earthen jar, dipped a spoonful of thick cream from the jar, and began to rub it on her cheeks.

"That's cold cream, anyhow," she said to herself. "It certainly is cold. Ach, I don't like the feel of it on my face; it's too sticky and wet." But she rubbed valiantly until the spoonful was used and her face glowed.

"Now paint, red paint—I don't dare use the kind you put on houses, for that's too hard to get off; let's see—I guess red-beet juice will do."

She stooped to the cool, earthen floor, lifted the cover from a crock of pickled beets, dipped the spoon into the juice and began to rub the colored liquid upon her glowing cheeks.

"If I only had a looking-glass, then I could see just where to put it on. But I don't dare to carry the juice up the steps, for if I spilled some just after Aunt Maria has them scrubbed for Sunday she'd be cross."

She applied the red juice by guesswork, with the inevitable result that her ears, chin, and nose were stained as deeply as her cheeks.

"Now the powder, then I'm through."

She tiptoed up to the kitchen again, took a handful of flour from the bin and rubbed it upon her face.

"Ugh, um," she sputtered, as some of the flour flew into her eyes and nostrils. "I guess that was too thick!" Then she knelt on a chair and looked into the small mirror that hung in the kitchen. She exclaimed in horror and disappointment at the vision that met her gaze.

"Why, I don't like that! I look awful! I'll rub off some of the flour. I have blotches all over my face. Do all prima donnas look this way, I wonder. But David knows, I guess. I'll ask him if I did it right."

She grabbed one end of the kitchen towel and disposed of some of the superfluous flour, then, still doubtful of her appearance, opened the door to the porch where the boy waited for her.

"Do I look——" she began, but David burst into hilarious laughter.

"Oh, oh," he held his sides and laughed. "Oh, your face——"

"Don't you laugh at me, David Eby! Don't you dare laugh!"

She was deeply hurt at his unseemly behavior, but the deluge was only beginning! The sound of David's laughter and Phœbe's raised voice reached the front room where the quilting party was in progress.

"Sounds like somebody on the back porch," said Aunt Maria. "Guess I better go and see. With so many tramps around always abody can't be too careful."

The sight that met Maria Metz's eyes as she opened the back door left her speechless. Phœbe turned and the two looked at each other in silence for a few long moments.

"Don't scold her," David said, sobered by the sudden appearance of the woman and frightened for Phœbe—Aunt Maria could be stern, he knew. "Don't scold her. I told her to do it."

"You did not, David; don't you tell lies for me! You just told me how to do it and I went and done it myself. I'm playing prima donna, Aunt Maria," she explained, though she knew it was a futile attempt at justification. "I'm playing I'm a big singer, so I had to fix up in this dress and put my hair down this way and fix my face."

"Great singer—march in here!" The woman had fully regained her voice. "It's a bad girl you are! To think of your making such a monkey of yourself when I leave you go up in the garret to play! This ends playing in the garret. Next Saturday you sew! Ach, yes, you just come in," she commanded, for Phœbe hung back as they entered the house. "You come right in here and let all the women see how nice you play when I leave you go up in the garret instead of make you sew. This here's the tramp I found," she announced as she led her into the room where the women sat around the quilting frame and quilted.

"What!" several of them exclaimed as they turned from their sewing and looked at the child. Granny Hogendobler and David Eby's mother, however, smiled.

"What's on your face?" asked one woman sternly.

Phœbe hung her head, abashed.

"That's how nice she plays when I leave her go up on the garret and have a nice time instead of making her sew like she always has to Saturdays," Aunt Maria said in sharp tones which told the child all too plainly of the displeasure she had caused.

"I didn't mean," Phœbe looked up contritely, "I didn't mean to be bad and make you cross. I was just playing I was a big singer and I put cold cream and paint and powder on my face——"

"Cream!"

"Paint!"

"Powder!"

The shrill staccato words of the women set the child trembling.

"But—but," she faltered, "it'll all wash off." She gave a convincing nod of her head and rubbed a hand ruefully across the grotesquely decorated cheek. "It's just cream and red-beet juice and flour."

"Did I ever!" exclaimed the mother of Phares Eby.

"I-to-goodness!" laughed Granny Hogendobler.

"Vanity, vanity, all is vanity," quoted one of the other women.

"Come here, Phœbe," said the mother of David Eby, and that woman, a thin, alert little person with tender, kindly eyes, drew the unhappy little girl to her. "You poor, precious child," she said, "it's a shame for us all to sit here and look at you as if we wanted to eat you. You've just been playing, haven't you?" She turned to the other women. "Why, Maria, Susan, I remember just as well as if it were only yesterday how we used to rub our cheeks with rough mullein leaves to make them red for Love Feast, don't you remember?"

Aunt Maria's cheeks grew pink. "Ach, Barbara, mebbe we did that when we were young and foolish, but we didn't act like this."

"Not much different, I guess," said Phœbe's champion with a smile. "Only we forget it now. Phœbe is just like we were once and she'll get over it like we did. Let her play; she'll soon be too old to want to play or to know how. She ain't a bad child, just full of life and likes to do things other people don't think of doing."

"She, surely does," said Aunt Maria curtly, ill pleased by the woman's words. "Where that child gets all her notions from I'd like to know. It's something new every day."

"She'll be all right when she gets older," said David's mother.

"Be sure, yes," agreed Granny Hogendobler; "it don't do to be too strict."

"Mebbe so," said the other women, with various shades of understanding in their words.

Phœbe looked gratefully into the face of Granny Hogendobler, then she turned to David's mother and spoke to her as though there were no others present in the room.

"You know, don't you, how little girls like to play? You called me precious child just like she would——"

"She would," repeated Aunt Maria. "What do you mean?"

"I mean my mother," she explained and turned again to her champion. "I was just thinking this after on the garret that I'd like you for my mother, to adopt you for it like people do with children when they have none and want some. I hear lots of people call you Aunty Bab—dare I call you Mother Bab?"

The woman laid a hand on the child's tumbled hair. Her voice trembled as she answered, "Yes, Phœbe, you can call me Mother Bab. I have no little girl so you may fill that place. Now ask Aunt Maria if you should wash your face and get fixed right again."

"Shall I, Aunt Maria?"

"Yes. Go get cleaned up. Fold all them clothes right and put 'em in the trunk and put your hair in two plaits again. If you're big enough to do such dumb things you're big enough to comb your hair." And Aunt Maria, peeved and hurt at the child's behavior, went back to her quilting while Phœbe hurried from the room alone.

The child scrubbed the three layers of decoration from her face, trudged up the stairs to the attic, took off the rose-sprigged gown and folded it away—a disconsolate, disillusioned prima donna.

When the attic was once more restored to its orderliness she closed the window and went down-stairs to wrestle with her curls. They were tangled, but ordinarily she would have been able to braid them into some semblance of neatness, but the trying experience of the past moments, the joy of gaining an adopted mother, set her fingers bungling.

"Ach, I can't, I just can't make two braids!" she said at length, ready to burst into tears.

Then she remembered David. "Mebbe he's on the porch yet. I'll go see once."

With the narrow brown ribbons streaming from her hand and a hair-brush tucked under one arm she ran down the stairs. She found David, for once a gloomy figure, on the back porch, just where she had left him.

"David," she said softly, "will you help me?"

"Why"—his face brightened as he looked at her—"you ain't"—he started to say "crying"—"you ain't mad at me for getting you into trouble with Aunt Maria?"

"Ach, no. And I ain't never going to be mad at you now for I just adopted your mom for my mom—mother. She's going to be my Mother Bab; she said so."

"What?"

He knitted his forehead in a puzzled frown. Phœbe explained how kind his mother had been, how she understood what little girls like to do, how she had promised to be Mother Bab.

"You don't care, Davie, you ain't jealous?" she ended anxiously.

"Sure not," he assured her; "I think it's kinda nice, for she thinks you're a dandy. But did they haul you over the coals in there?"

"Yes, a little, all but Granny Hogendobler and your mom—Mother Bab, I mean. Isn't it funny to get a mother when you didn't have one for so long?"

"Guess so."

"But, David, will you help me? I can't fix my hair and Aunt Maria is so mad at me she said I can just fix it myself. The plaits won't come right at all. Will you help me, please?" She asserted her femininity by adding new sweetness to her voice as she asked the uncommon favor.

"Why"—he hesitated, then looked about to see if any one were near to witness what he was about to do—"I don't know if I can. I never braided hair, but I guess I can."

"Be sure you can, David. You braid it just like we braid the daisy stems and the dandelion stems in the fields. You're so handy with them, you can do most anything, I guess."

Spurred by her appreciation of his ability he took the brush and began to brush the tangled hair as she sat on the porch at his feet.

"Gee," he exclaimed as the hair sprang into curls when the brush left it, "your hair's just like gold!"

"And it's curly," she added proudly.

"Sure is. Wouldn't Phares look if he saw it! I told him your hair is prettier than Mary Warner's and he said I was silly to talk about girls' hair."

"I don't want him to see it this way," she said, "for he'd say it's a sin to have curly, pretty hair, even if God made it grow that way! He's awful queer! I wouldn't want him for my adopted brother."

"Guess he'd keep you hopping," laughed David.

"Guess I'd keep him hopping, too," retorted Phœbe, at which the boy laughed.

"Now what do I do?" he asked when all the hair was untangled.

"Part it in the middle and make two plaits."

"Um-uh."

The boy's clumsy fingers fumbled long with the parting; several times the braids twisted and had to be undone, but after a struggle he was able to announce, "There now, you're fixed! Now you're Phœbe Metz, no more prima donna!"

"Thanks, David, for helping me. I feel much better around the head—guess curls would be a nuisance after all."

CHAPTER VII

"WHERE THE BROOK AND RIVER MEET"

When Phœbe adopted Mother Bab she did so with the whole-heartedness and finality characteristic of her blood.

Mother Bab—the name never ceased to thrill the erstwhile motherless girl whose yearning for affection and understanding had been unsatisfied by the matter-of-fact Aunt Maria.

At first Maria Metz did not seem too well pleased with the child's persistent naming of Barbara Eby as Mother Bab; but gradually, as she saw Phœbe's joy in the adoption, the woman acknowledged to herself that another woman was capable of mothering where she had failed.

Phœbe spent many hours in the little house on the hill, learning from Mother Bab many things that made indelible impressions upon her sensitive child-heart, unraveling some of the tangled knots of her soul, stirring anew hopes and aspirations of her being. But there remained one knot to be untangled—she could not understand why the plain dress and white cap existed, she could not reconcile the utter simplicity of dress with the lavish beauty of the birds, flowers—all nature.

"It will come," Mother Bab assured her one day. "You are a little girl now and cannot see into everything. But when you are older you will see how beautiful it is to live simply and plainly."

"But is it necessary, Mother Bab?" the child cried out. "Must I dress like you and Aunt Maria if I want to be good?"

"No, you don't have to. Many people are good without wearing the plain garb. A great many people in the world never heard of the plain sects we have in this section of the country, and there are good people everywhere, I'm sure of that. But it is just as true that each person must find the best way to lead a good life. If you can wear fine clothes and still be good and lead a Christian life, then there is no harm in the pretty clothes. But for me the easiest way to be living right is to live as simply as I can. This is the way for me."

"I'm afraid it's the way for me, too," confessed Phœbe. "I'm vain, awfully vain! I love pretty clothes and I'll never be satisfied till I get 'em—silk dresses, soft, shiny satin ones—ach, I guess I'm vain but I'll have to wait to satisfy my vanity till I'm older, for Aunt Maria is so set against fancy clothes."

It was true, Maria Metz compromised on some matters as Phœbe grew older, but on the question of clothes the older woman was adamant. The child should have comfortable dresses but there would positively be no useless ornaments or adornments, such as wide sashes, abundance of laces, elaborately trimmed ruffles. Fancy hats, jewelry and unconfined curls were also strictly forbidden.

Though Phœbe, even as she grew older, had much time to spend outdoors, there were many tasks about the house and farm she had to perform. The chest was soon filled with quilts and that bugbear was gone from her life. But there was continual scrubbing, baking, mending, and other household tasks to be done, so that much practice caused the girl to develop into a capable little housekeeper. Aunt Maria frankly admitted that Phœbe worked cheerfully and well, a matter she found consoling in the trying hours when Phœbe "wasted time" by playing the low walnut organ in the sitting-room.

During Miss Lee's first term of teaching on the hill she taught her how to play simple exercises and songs and the child, musically inclined, made the most of the meagre knowledge and adeptly improved until she was able to play the hymns in the Gospel Hymn Book and the songs and carols in the old Music Book that had belonged to her mother and always rested on the top of the old low organ.

So the organ became a great solace and joy, an outlet for the intense feelings of desire and hope in her heart. When her voice joined with the sweet tones of the old instrument it seemed to Phœbe as if she were echoing the harmony of the eternal music of all creation. Child though she was, she sang with the joy and sincerity of the true musician. She merely smiled when Aunt Maria characterized her best efforts as "doodling" and rejoiced when her father, Mother Bab or David praised her singing.

In school she progressed rapidly but her interest lagged when, after two years of teaching, Miss Lee resigned her position as teacher of the school on the hill and a new teacher took command. The entire school missed the teacher from Philadelphia, but Phœbe was almost inconsolable. She, especially, appreciated the gain of contact with the teacher she loved and she continued to profit by the remembrance of many things Miss Lee had taught her. The Memory Gems, alone, bore evidence of the change the teacher from the city had wrought in the rural school. Phœbe smiled as she thought how the poems had been sing-songed until Miss Lee taught the children to bring out the meaning of the words.

"Oh, my," she laughed one day as she and David were speaking of school happenings, "do you remember how John Schneider used to say Memory Gems? The day he got up and said, 'Have-you-heard-the-waters-singing-little-May—where-the-willows-green-are-bending-over-the-way—do-you-know-how-low-and-sweet-are-the-words-the-waves-repeat—to-the-pebbles-at-their-feet—night-and-day?'"

David laughed at the girl's droll imitation, the way she sing-songed the verse in the exact manner prevalent in many rural schools.

"And do you remember," he asked, "the day Isaac Hunchberger defined bipeds?"

"Oh, yes! I'll never forget that! It was the day the County Superintendent of Schools came to visit our school and Miss Lee was anxious to have us show off. Isaac showed off, all right, with his 'Bipets are sings vis two lex!' I guess Miss Lee decided that day that the Pennsylvania Dutch is ingrained in our English and hard to get out."

To Phœbe each Memory Gem of her school days became, in truth, a gem stored away for future years. Long after she had outgrown the little rural school scraps of poetry returned to her to rewaken the enthusiasm of childhood and to teach her again to "hear the lark within the songless egg and find the fountain where they wailed, 'Mirage!'"

Phœbe wanted so many things in those school-day years but she wanted most of all to become like Miss Lee. So earnestly did she try to speak as her teacher taught her that after a time the peculiar idioms and expressions became more infrequent and there was only a delightfully quaint inflection, an occasional phrase, to betray her Pennsylvania Dutch parentage. But in times of stress or excitement she invariably slipped back into the old way and prefaced her exclamations with an expressive "Ach!"

Life on the Metz farm went on in even tenor year in and year out. Maria Metz never changed to any appreciable extent her mode of living or her methods of working, and she tried to teach Phœbe to conform to the same monotonous existence and live as several generations of Metzes had done. But Phœbe was a veritable Evelyn Hope, made of "spirit, fire and dew." The distinctiveness of her personality grew more pronounced as she slipped from childhood into girlhood and Maria Metz needed often to encourage her own heart for the task of rearing into ideal womanhood the daughter of her brother Jacob.

Phœbe had a deep love for nature and this love was fostered by her sturdy farmer-father. As she followed him about the fields he taught her the names of wild flowers, told her the nesting haunts of birds, initiated her into the circle of tree-lore, taught her to keep ears, eyes and heart open for the treasures of the great outdoors.

Phœbe required no urging in that direction. Her heart was filled with an insatiable desire to know more and more of the beautiful world about her. She gathered knowledge from every country walk; she showed so much "uncommon sense," David Eby said, that it was a keen pleasure to show her the nests of the thrush or the rare nests of the humming-bird. David and his mother, enthusiastic seekers after nature knowledge, augmented the father's nature education of Phœbe by frequent walks to field and woods. And so, when Phœbe was twelve years old she knew the haunts of all the wild flowers within walking distance of her home. With her father or with David and Mother Bab she found the first marsh-marigolds in the meadows, the first violets of the wooded slope of the hill, the earliest hepatica with its woolly buds, the first windflowers and spring beauties. She knew when the time was come for the bloodroot to lift its pure white petals about the golden hearts in the spot where the rich mould at the base of some giant tree nurtured the blooded plants. She could find the canopied Jack-in-the-pulpit and the pink azalea on the hill near her home. She knew the exact spot, a mile from the gray farmhouse, where, in a lovely little wood by a quiet road, a profusion of bird-foot violets and bluets made a carpet of blue loveliness each spring—so on, through the fleet days of summer, till the last asters and goldenrod faded, the child reveled in the beauties and wonders of the world at her feet and loved every part of it, from the tiny blue speedwell in the grass to the gorgeous orioles in the trees. What if Aunt Maria sometimes scolded her for bringing so many "weeds" into the house! With apparent unconcern she placed her flowers in a glass or earthen jar and secretly thought, "Well, I'm glad I like these pretty things; they are not weeds to me."

The buoyancy of childhood tarried with her into girlhood. Like the old inscription of the sun-dial, she seemed to "count none but sunny hours." But those who knew her best saw that the shadows of life also left their marks upon her. At times the gaiety was displaced by seriousness. Mother Bab knew of the struggles in the girl's heart. Granny Hogendobler could have told of the hours Phœbe spent with her consoling her for the absence of Nason, mitigating the cruel stabs of the thoughtless people who condemned him, comforting with the assurance that he would return to his home some day. Old Aaron loved the girl and found her always ready to listen to his hackneyed story of the battle of Gettysburg.

Phœbe was a student in the Greenwald High School when the war clouds broke over Europe and the world seemed to go mad in a whirl. She hurried to Old Aaron for his opinion on the terrible war.

"Isn't it awful," she said to him, "that so many nations are flying at each other's throats? And in these days of our boasted civilization!"

"Awful," he agreed. "But, mark my words, this is just the beginning. Before the thing's settled we'll be in it too."

She shrank from the words. "Oh, no, not America! That would be too terrible. David might go then, and a lot of Greenwald boys—oh, that would be awful!"

"Yes! But it would be far more dreadful to have them sit back safe while others died for the freedom of the world. I'd rather have my boy a soldier at a time like this than have him be ruler of a country."

The old man's words ended quaveringly. The pent-up agony of his disappointment in his son surged over him, and he bowed his head in his hands and wept.

Phœbe sent Granny to comfort him, and then stole away. The veteran's grief left an impression upon her. Were his words prophetic? Would America be drawn into the struggle? It was preposterous to dream of that. She would forget the words of Old Aaron, for she had important matters of her own to think about. In a few years she would be graduated from High School and then she would have her own life-work to decide upon. Her desire for larger experience, her determination to do something of importance after graduation was her chief interest. The war across the sea was too remote to bring constant fear to her. Dutifully she went about her work on the farm and pursued her studies. She was not without pity for the brave people of Servia and Belgium, not without praise for the heroic French and English. She added her vehement words of horror as she read of the atrocities visited upon the helpless peoples. She shared in the dread of many Americans that the octopus-arm of war might reach this country, and yet she was more concerned about her own future than about the future of battle-racked France or devastated Belgium.

CHAPTER VIII

BEYOND THE ALPS LIES ITALY

Phœbe's graduation from the Greenwald High School was her red-letter day. Several times during the morning she stole to the spare-room where her graduation dress lay spread upon the high bed. Accompanied by Aunt Maria she had made a special trip to Lancaster for the frock, though Aunt Maria had conscientiously bought a few yards of muslin and apron gingham.

The material was soft silky batiste of the quality Phœbe liked. The style, also, was of her choosing. She felt a glow of satisfaction as she looked at the dress so simply, yet fashionably, made.

"For once in my life I have a dress I like," she thought.

After supper, just as she was ready to dress for the great event, Phares Eby came to the gray farmhouse.

The years had changed the solemn, serious boy into a more solemn, serious man. Tall and broad-shouldered, he was every inch a man in appearance. He was, moreover, a man highly respected in the community, a successful farmer and also a preacher in the Church of the Brethren. The latter honor had been conferred upon him a year before Phœbe's graduation and had seemed to increase his gravity and endow him with true bishopric dignity. He dressed after the manner of the majority of men who are affiliated with the Church of the Brethren in that district. His chin was covered with a thick, black beard, his dark hair was parted in the middle and combed behind his ears. He looked ten years older than he was and gave an impression of reserved strength, indomitable will and rigidity of purpose in furthering what he deemed a good cause.

Phœbe felt a slight intimidation in his presence as she noted how serious he had grown, how mature he seemed. He appeared to desire the same friendship with her and tried to be comradely as of old, but there remained a feeling of restraint between them.

"Hello, Phares," she greeted him as cordially as possible on her Commencement night.

"Good-evening," he returned. "Are you ready for the great event?"

"Yes, if I don't have heart failure before I get in to town. If only I had been fourth or fifth in the class marks instead of second, then I might have escaped to-night with just a solo. As it is, I must deliver the Salutatory oration."

"Phœbe, you want to get off too easily! But I cannot stay more than a minute, for I know you'll want to get ready. I just stopped to give you a little gift for your graduation, a copy of Longfellow's poems."

"Oh, thanks, Phares. I like his poems."

"I thought you did. But I must go now," he said stiffly. "I'll see you to-night at Commencement. I hope you'll get through the oration all right."

"Thanks. I hope so."

When he was gone she made a wry face. "Whew," she whistled. "I'm sure Phares is a fine young man but he's too solemncoly. He gives me the woolies! If he's like that all the time I'm glad I don't have to live in the same house. Wonder if he really knows how to be jolly. But, shame on you, Phœbe Metz, talking so about your old friend! Perhaps for that I'll forget my oration to-night." With a gay laugh she ran away to dress for the most important occasion of her life.

The white dress was vastly becoming. Its soft folds fell gracefully about her slender young figure. Her hair was brushed back, gathered into a bow at the top of her head, and braided into one thick braid which ended in a curl. There were no loving fingers of mother or sister to arrange the folds of her gown, no fond eyes to appraise her with looks of approval, but if she felt the omission she gave no evidence of it. She seemed especially gay as she dressed alone in her room. When she had finished she surveyed herself in the glass.

"Um, Phœbe Metz, you don't look half bad! Now go and do as well as you look. If Aunt Maria heard me she'd be shocked, but what's the use pretending to be so stupid or innocent as not to appreciate your own good points. Any person with good sight and ordinary sense can tell whether their appearance is pleasing or otherwise. I like this dress——"

"Phœbe," Aunt Maria's voice came up the stairs.

"Yes?"

"Why, David's down. Are you done dressing?"

"I'll be down in a minute."

David Eby, too, was a man grown, but a man so different! Like his cousin, Phares, he was tall. He had the same dark hair and eyes but his eyes were glowing, and his hair was cut close and his chin kept smooth-shaven.

Between him and Phœbe there existed the old comradeship, free of restraint or embarrassment. He ran to meet her as her steps sounded on the stairs.

But she came down sedately, her hand sliding along the colonial hand-rail, a calm dignity about her, her lovely head erect.

"Good-evening," she said in quiet tones.

"Whew!" he whistled. "Sweet girl graduate is too mild a phrase! Come, unbend, Phœbe. You don't expect me to call you Miss Metz or to kiss your hand—ah, shall I?"

"Davie"—in a twinkling the assumed dignity deserted her, she was all girl again, animated and adorable—"Davie, you're hopeless! Here I pose before the mirror to find the most impressive way to hold my head and be sufficiently dignified for the occasion, and you come bursting into the hall like a tomboy, whistling and saying funny things."

"I'm awfully sorry. But you took my breath away. I haven't gotten it back yet"—he breathed deeply.

"David, will you ever grow up?"

"I'll have to now. I see you've gone and done it."

"Ach no," she lapsed into the childhood expression. "I'm not grown up. But how do I look? You won't tell me so I have to ask you."

"You look like a Madonna," he said seriously.

"Oh," she said impatiently, "that sounded like Phares."

"Gracious, then I'll change it! You look like an angel and good enough to eat. But honestly, Phœbe, that dress is dandy! You look mighty nice."

"Glad you think so. Shall I tell you a secret, David? I'm scared pink about to-night."

"You scared?" He whistled again.

"Don't be so smart," she said with a frown. "Were you scared on your Commencement night?"

"Um-uh. At first I was. But you'll get over it in a few minutes. The lights and the glory of the occasion dim the scary feeling when you sit up there in the seats of honor. You should be glad your oration is first."

"I am. Mary Warner is welcome to her Valedictory and the long wait to deliver it."

Phœbe stiffened a bit at the thought of the other girl. Since the days when the two girls attended the rural school on the hill and Mary Warner was the possessor of curls while Phœbe wore the despised braids the other girl seemed to have everything for which Phœbe longed.

"Ah, don't you care about the honor," said David. "Honors don't always tell who knows the most. Why, look at me; I was fifth in my class and I know as much any day as the little runt who was first."

"Conceit!" laughed Phœbe. "But I guess you do know more than he does. Bet he never saw an orioles' nest or found a wild pink moccasin. You're a wonder at such things, David."

"Um," came the sober answer, but there was a merry twinkle in his eyes, "I'm a wonder all right! Too bad only you and Mother Bab know it. But if I don't soon go you won't get to town in time to get the pink roses arranged just so for the grand march. The girls in our class primped about twenty minutes, patting their hair and fixing their ribbons and fussing with their flowers."

"David, you're horrid!"

"I know. But I brought you something more to primp with." He handed her a small flat box.

"For me?"

"From Mother Bab," he said.

"Oh, David, that's a beauty!" she cried as she held up a scarf of pale blue crepe de chine. "I'll wear it to-night. Tell Mother Bab I thank her over and over. But I'll see her to-night and tell her myself; she'll be in at Commencement."

"She can't come, Phœbe. She's sorry, but she has one of her dreadful headaches and you know what that means, how sick she really is."

"Oh, Davie, Mother Bab not coming to my Commencement—why, I'm so disappointed, I want her there"—the tears were near the surface.

"She's sorry, too, Phœbe, but she's too sick when those headaches get her. Her eyes are the cause of them, we think now."

"And I'm horribly selfish to think of myself and my disappointment when she is suffering. You tell her I'll be up to see her in the morning and tell her all about to-night. You are coming?"

"Sure thing! Aunt Mary is coming over to stay with mother, but there is really nothing to do for her; the pain seems to have to run its course. She'll go to bed early and be perfectly all right when she wakes in the morning. Come on, now, cheer up, and get ready for that 'Over the Alps lies Italy.'"

"It's 'Beyond the Alps lies Italy,'" she corrected him. Her disappointment was softened by his cheerfulness.

"Ach, it's all the same," he insisted, and went off smiling.

To Phœbe that night seemed like a dream—the slow march down the aisle of the crowded auditorium to the elevated platform where the nine graduates sat in a semicircle; the sea of faces swathed in the bright glow of many lights; the perfume of the pink roses in her arm; the music of the High School chorus, and then the time when she rose and stood before the people to deliver her oration, "Beyond the Alps lies Italy."

She began rather shakily; the sea of faces seemed so very formidable, so many eyes looked at her—how could she ever finish! She spoke mechanically at first, but gradually the magic of the Italy of her dreams stole upon her, a singular softness crept into her voice, a mellowness like music, as she depicted the blue skies of the sunny land-of-dreams-come-true.

When she returned to her place in the semicircle a glow of satisfaction possessed her. She felt she had not failed, that she had, in truth, done very well. But later, when Mary Warner rose to deliver the Valedictory, Phœbe felt her own efforts shrink into littleness. The dark-eyed beautiful Mary was a sad thorn in the flesh for the fair girl who knew she was always overshadowed by the brilliant, queenly brunette. Involuntarily the country girl looked at David Eby—he was listening intently to Mary; his eyes never seemed to leave her face. Little, sharp pangs of jealousy thrust themselves into the depths of Phœbe's heart. Was it true, then, that David cared for Mary Warner? Town gossips said he frequented her house. Phœbe had met them together on the Square recently—not that she cared, of course! She sat erect and held her pink roses more tightly against her heart. It mattered little to her if David liked other girls; it was only that she felt a sense of proprietorship over the boy whose mother was her Mother Bab—thus she tried to console herself and quiet the demons of jealousy until the program was completed, congratulations received, and she stood with her aunt and father, ready for the trip back to the gray farmhouse.

Teachers and friends had congratulated her, but it was David Eby's hearty, "You did all right, Phœbe," that gave her the keenest joy.

"Did you walk in?" she asked him as she gathered her roses, diploma and scarf, preparatory to departure.

"Yes."

"Then you can drive out with us," her father offered.

"Yes, of course," she seconded the suggestion. "We have room in the carriage."

So it happened that Phœbe, the blue scarf about her shoulders, sat beside David as they drove over the country road, home from her graduation. The vehicle rattled somewhat, but the young folks on the rear seat could speak and hear above the clatter.

"I'm glad it's over," Phœbe sighed in relief. "But what next?"

"Mary Warner is going to enter some prep school this fall and prepare for Vassar," David informed the girl beside him.

"Lucky Mary"—Mary Warner—she was sick of the name! "I wish I knew what I want to do."

"Want to go away to school?"

"I don't know. Aunt Maria wants me to stay at home on the farm and just help her. Daddy doesn't say much, but he did ask me if I would like to go to Millersville. That's a fine Normal School and if I wanted to be a teacher I'd go to that school, but I don't want to be a teacher. What I really want to do is go away and study music."

"Well, can't you do it? That is not really impossible."

"No, but——"

"No, but," he mimicked. "But won't take you anywhere."

"You set me thinking, David. Perhaps it isn't so improbable, after all. I'm coming over to see Mother Bab to-morrow; she'll be full of suggestions. She'll see a way for me to get what I want; she always does."

"I bet she will," agreed David. "You'll be that primer donner yet," he mimicked, "I know you will."

"Oh, Davie, wouldn't it be great! But I wouldn't beautify my face with cream and beet juice and flour!"

They laughed so heartily that Aunt Maria turned and asked the cause of the merriment.

"We were just speaking of the time when I dressed in the garret and fixed my face—the time you had the quilting party."

"Ach," Aunt Maria said, smiling in the darkness. "You looked dreadful that day. I was good and mad at you! But I'm glad you're big enough now not to do such dumb things. My, now that you're done with school and will stay home with me we can have some nice times sewin' and quiltin' and makin' rugs, ain't, Phœbe?"

In the semi-darkness of the carriage Phœbe looked at David. The appealing wistfulness of her face touched him. He patted her arm reassuringly and whispered to her, "Don't you worry. It'll come out all right. Mother Bab will help you."

CHAPTER IX

A VISIT TO MOTHER BAB

The next day as Phœbe walked up the hill to visit Mother Bab she went eagerly and with an unusual light in her eyes—she had transformed her schoolgirl braid into the coiffure of a woman! The golden hair was parted in the middle, twisted into a shapely knot in the nape of her neck, and the effect was highly satisfactory, she thought.

"Mother Bab will be surprised," she said gladly as she swung up the hill in rapid, easy strides. "And David—I wonder what David will say if he's home."

At the summit of the hill she paused and turned, looked back at the gray farmhouse and beyond it to the little town of Greenwald.

"I just must stand here a minute and look! I love this view from the hill."

She breathed deeply and continued to revel in the beauty of the scene. At the foot of the hill was the Metz farm nestling in its green surroundings. Like a tan ribbon the dusty road went winding past green fields, then hid itself as it dipped into a valley and made a sharp curve, though Phœbe knew that it went on past more fields and meadows to the town. Where she stood she had a view of the tall spires of Greenwald churches straggling through the trees, and the red and slate roofs of comfortable houses gleaming in the sunlight. Beyond and about the town lay fields resplendent in the pristine freshness of May greenery.

"Oh," she said aloud after a long gaze, "this is glorious! But I must hurry to Mother Bab. I'm wild to have her see me. Aunt Maria just said when I showed her my hair, 'Yes well, Phœbe, I guess you're old enough to wear your hair up.' Mother Bab is different. Sometimes I pity Aunt Maria and wonder what kind of childhood she had to make her so grim about some things."

The little house in which David and his mother lived stood near the country road leading to the schoolhouse on the hill. Like many other farmhouses of that county it was square, substantial and unadorned, its attractiveness being derived solely from its fine proportions, its colonial doorways, and the harmonious surroundings of trees and flowers. The garden was eloquent of the lavish love bestowed upon it. Mother Bab delighted in flowers and planted all the old favorites. The walks between the garden beds were trim and weedless, the yard and buildings well kept, and the entire little farm gave evidence that the reputed Pennsylvania Dutch thrift and neatness were present there.

Adjoining the farm of Mother Bab was the farm of her brother-in-law, the father of Phares Eby. This was one of the best known in the community. Its great barns and vast acres quite eclipsed the modest little dwelling beside it. David Eby sometimes sighed as he compared the two farms and wondered why Fate had bestowed upon his uncle's efforts an almost unparalleled success while his own father had had a continual struggle to hold on to the few acres of the little farm. Since the death of his father David had often felt the straining of the yoke. It was toil, toil, on acres which were rich but apparently unwilling to yield their fullness. One year the crops were damaged by hail, another year prolonged drought prevented full development of the fruit, again continued rainy weather ruined the hay, and so on, year in and year out, there was seldom a season when the farm measured up to the expectations of the hard-working David.

But Mother Bab never complained about the ill-luck, neither did she envy the woman in the great house next to her. Mother Bab's philosophy of life was mainly cheerful:

"I find earth not gray, but rosy,
Heaven not grim, but fair of hue.
Do I stoop? I pluck a posy.
Do I stand and stare? All's blue."

A little house to shelter her, a big garden in which to work, to dream, to live; enough worldly goods to supply daily sustenance; the love of her David—truly her Beloved, as the old Hebrew name signifies—the love of the dear Phœbe who had adopted her—given these blessings and no envy or discontent ever ventured near the white-capped woman. Life had brought her many hours of perplexity and several great sorrows, but it had also bestowed upon her compensating joys. She felt that the years would bring her new joys, now that her boy was grown into a man and was able to manage the farm. Some day he would bring home a wife—how she would love David's wife! But meanwhile, she was not lonely. Her friends and she were much together, quilting, rugging, comparing notes on the garden.

"Guess Mother Bab'll be in the garden," thought Phœbe, "for it's such a fine day."

But as she neared the whitewashed fence of the garden she saw that the place was deserted. She ran lightly up the walk, rapped at the kitchen door, and entered without waiting for an answer to her knock.

"Mother Bab," she called.

"I'm here, Phœbe," came a voice from the sitting-room.

"How are you? Is your headache all gone?" Phœbe asked as she ran to the beloved person who came to meet her.

"All gone. I was so disappointed last night—but what have you done to your hair?"

"Oh, I forgot!" Phœbe lifted her head proudly. "I meant to knock at the front door and be company to-day. I've got my hair up!"

"Phœbe, Phœbe," the woman drew her nearer. "Let me look at you." Her eyes scanned the face of the girl, her voice quivered as she spoke. "You've grown up! Of course it didn't come in a night but it seems that way."

"The May fairies did it, Mother Bab. Yesterday I wore a braid. This morning when I woke I heard the robin who sings every morning in the apple tree outside my window and he was caroling, 'Put it up! Put it up!' I knew he meant my hair, so here I am, waiting for your blessing."

"You have it, you always have it! But"—she changed her mood—"are you sure the robin wasn't saying, 'Get up, get up!' Phœbe?"

"Positive; it was only five o'clock."

"Now I must hear all about last night," said Mother Bab as they sat together on the broad wooden settee in the sitting-room. "David told me how nice you looked and how well you did."

"Did he tell you how pleased I am with the scarf? It's just lovely! And the color is beautiful. I wonder why—I wonder why I love pretty things so much, really pretty things, like crepe de chine and taffeta and panne velvet and satin. Oh, sometimes I think I must have them. When I go to Lancaster I want lots of lovely clothes and I hate ginghams and percales and serviceable things."

"I know, Phœbe, I know how you feel about it."

"Do you really? Then it can't be so awfully wicked. You are so understanding, Mother Bab. I can't tell Aunt Maria how I feel about such things for she'd be dreadfully hurt or worried or provoked, but you seem always to know what I mean and how I feel."

"I was eighteen myself once, a good many years ago, but I still remember it."

"You have a good memory."

"Yes. Why, I can remember some of the dresses I wore when I was eighteen. But then, I have a dress bundle to help me remember them."

"What's a dress bundle?"

"Didn't Aunt Maria keep one for you?"

"I never heard of one."

"It's a long string of samples of dresses you wore when you were little. Wait, I'll get mine and show you."

She left the room and went up-stairs. After a short time she returned and held out a stout thread upon which were strung small, irregular scraps of dress material. "This is my dress bundle. My mother started it for me when I was a baby and kept it up till I was big enough to do it myself. Every time I got a new dress a little patch of the goods was threaded on my dress bundle."

"Oh, may I see? Why, that's just like a part of your babyhood and childhood come back!"

The two heads bent over the bundle—the girl's with its light hair in its first putting up, the woman's with its graying hair folded under the white cap.

"Here"—Mother Bab turned the bundle upside down and fingered the scraps with that loving way of those who are dreaming of long departed days and touching a relic of those cherished hours—"this white calico with the little pink dots was the first dress any one gave me. Grandmother Hoerner made it for me, all by hand. Funny, wasn't it, the way they used to put colored dresses on wee babies! See, here are pink calico ones and white with red figures and a few blue ones. I wore all these when I was a baby. Then when I grew older these; they are much prettier. This red delaine I wore to a spelling bee when I was about sixteen and I got a book for a prize for standing up next to last. This red and black checked debaige I can see yet. It had an overskirt on it trimmed with little ruffles. This purple cashmere with the yellow sprigs in it I had all trimmed with narrow black velvet ribbon. I'll never forget that dress—I wore it the day I met David's father."

"Oh, you must have looked lovely!"

"He said so." She smiled; her eyes looked beyond Phœbe, back to the golden days of her youth when Love had come to her to bless and to abide with her long beyond the tarrying of the spirit in the flesh. "He said I looked nice. I met him the first time I wore the purple dress. It was at a corn-husking party at Jerry Grumb's barn. Some man played the fiddle and we danced."

"Danced!" echoed Phœbe.

"Yes, danced. But just the old-fashioned Virginia reel. We had cider and apples and cake and pie for our treat and we went home at ten o'clock! David walked home with me in the moonlight and I guess we liked each other from the first. We were married the next year, then we both turned plain."

"Were you ever sorry, Mother Bab?"

"That I married him, or that I turned plain?"

"Yes. Both, I mean."

"No, never sorry once, Phœbe, about either. We were happy together. And about turning plain, why, I wasn't sorry either."

"But you had to give up Virginia reels and pretty dresses."

"Yes, but I learned there are deeper, more important things than dancing and wearing pretty dresses."

She looked at Phœbe, but the girl had bowed her head over the dress bundle and appeared to be thinking.

"And so," continued Mother Bab softly, "my bundle ended with that dress. Since I dress plain I don't wear colors, just gray and black. But I always thought if I had a girl I'd start a dress bundle for her, for it's so much satisfaction to get it out sometimes and look over the pieces and remember the dresses and some of the happy times you had when you wore them. But the girl never came."

"But you have David!"

"Yes, to be sure, he's been so much to me, but I couldn't make him a dress bundle. He wouldn't have liked it when he grew older—boys are different. And I wouldn't want him to be a sissy, either."

"He isn't, Mother Bab. He's fine!"

"I think so, Phœbe. He has worked so hard since he's through school and he's so good to me and takes such care of the farm, though the crops don't always turn out as we want. But you haven't told me what you are going to do, now that you're through school."

"I don't know. I want to do something."

"Teach?"

"No. What I would like best of all is study music."

"In Greenwald? You mean to learn to play?"

"No, to learn to sing. I have often dreamed of studying music in a great city, like Philadelphia."

"What would you do then?"

"Sing, sing! I feel that my voice is my one talent and I don't want to bury it."

"Well, don't Miss Lee live in Philadelphia? Perhaps she could help you to get a good teacher and find a place to board."

"Mother Bab!" Phœbe sprang to her feet and wrapped her arms about the slender little woman. "That's just it!" she cried. "I never thought of that! David said you'd help me. I'll write to Miss Lee to-day!"

"Phœbe," the woman said, smiling at the girl's wild enthusiasm.

"I'm not crazy, just inspired," said Phœbe. "You helped me, I knew you would! I want to go to Philadelphia to study music but I know daddy and Aunt Maria would never listen to any proposals about going to a big city and living among strangers. But if I write to Miss Lee and she says she'll help me the folks at home may consider the plan. I'll have a hard time, though"—a reactionary doubt touched her—"I'll have a dreadful time persuading Aunt Maria that I'm safe and sane if I mention music and Philadelphia and Phœbe in the same breath." Then she smiled determinedly. "At least I'm going to make a brave effort to get what I want. I'm not going to settle down on the farm and get brown and fat and wear gingham dresses all my life, and sunbonnets in the bargain! I never could see why I had to wear sunbonnets, I always hated them. Aunt Maria always tried to make me wear them, but as soon as I was out of her sight I sneaked them off. I remember one time I threw my bonnet in the Chicques and I had the loveliest time watching it disappear down the stream. But Aunt Maria made me make another one that was uglier still, so I gained nothing but the temporary pleasure of seeing it float away. And how I hated to do patchwork! It seemed to me I was always doing it, and I never could see the sense of cutting up pieces and then sewing them together again."

"But the sewing was good practice for you, Phœbe. Patchwork—seems to me all our life is patchwork: a little here and a little there; one color now, then another; one shape first, then another shape fitted in; and when it is all joined it will be beautiful if we keep the parts straight and the colors and shapes right. It can be a very beautiful rising sun or an equally pretty flower basket, or it can be just a crazy quilt with little of the beautiful about it."

"Mother Bab, if I had known that while I was patching I would have loved to patch! I had nothing to make it interesting; it was just stitching, stitching, stitching on seams! But those vivid quilts are all finished and I guess Aunt Maria is as glad about it as I am, for I gave her some worried hours before the end was sighted. Poor Aunt Maria, she should be glad to have me go to the city. I've led her some merry chases, but I must admit she was always equal to them, forged ahead of me many times."

"Phœbe, you're a wilful child and I'm afraid I spoil you more."

"No you don't! You're my safety valve. If I couldn't come up here and say the things I really feel I'd have to tell it to the Jenny Wrens—Aunt Maria hates to have me talk to myself."

"But she's good to you, Phœbe?"

"Yes, oh, yes! I appreciate all she has done for me. She has taken care of me since I was a tiny baby. I'll never forget that. It's just that we are so different. I can't make Phœbe Metz be just like Maria Metz, can I?"

"No, you must be yourself, even if you are different."

"That's it, Mother Bab. I feel I have the right to live my life as I choose, that no person shall say to me I must live it so or so. If I want to study music why shouldn't I do so? My mother left a few hundred dollars for me; it's been on interest and amounts to more than a few hundred, about a thousand dollars, I think. So the money end of my studying music need not worry Aunt Maria. I am determined to do it, wouldn't you?"

"I suppose I'd feel the same way."

"How did you learn to understand so well, Mother Bab? You have lived all your life on a farm, yet you are not narrow."

"I hope I have not grown narrow," the woman said softly. "I have read a great deal. I have read—don't you breathe it to a soul—I have often read when I should have been baking pies or washing windows!"

"No wonder David worships you so."

"I still enjoy reading," said Mother Bab. "David subscribes for three good magazines and when they come I'm so anxious to look into them that sometimes my cooking burns."

"That must be one of the reasons your English is correct. I am ashamed of myself when I mix my v's and w's and use a t for a d. I have often wished the Pennsylvania Dutch dialect would have been put aside long ago."

"Yes," the woman agreed, "I can't see the need of it. It has been ridiculed so long that it should have died a natural death. It's a mystery to me how it has survived. But cheer up, Phœbe, the gibberish is dying out. The older people will continue to speak it but the younger generations are becoming more and more English speaking. Why, do you know, Phœbe, since this war started in Europe and I read the dreadful crimes the Germans are committing I feel that I never want to hear or say, 'Yah.'"

"Bully!" Phœbe clapped her hands. "I said to old Aaron Hogendobler yesterday that I'm ashamed I have a German name and some German ancestors, even if they did come to this country before the Revolution, and he said no one need feel shame at that, but every American who is not one hundred per cent American should die from shame. I know we Pennsylvania Dutch can carry our end of the burdens of the world and be real Americans, but I want to sound like one too."

Mother Bab laughed. "Just yesterday I said to David that the butter was all."

"I say that very often. I must read more."

"And I less. I haven't told you, Phœbe, nor David, but my eyes are going back on me. I went to Lancaster a few weeks ago and the doctor there said I must be very careful not to strain them at all. I think I'd rather lose any other sense than sight. I always thought it was the greatest affliction in the world to be blind."

"It is! It mustn't come to you, Mother Bab!"

The woman looked worried, but in a moment her face brightened.

"Anyhow," she said, "what's the use of worrying or thinking about it? If it ever comes I'll have to bear it just as many other people are bearing it. I'm glad I have sight to-day to see you."

Phœbe gave her an ecstatic hug. "I believe you're Irish instead of Pennsylvania Dutch! You do know how to blarney and you have that coaxing, lovely way about you that the Irish are supposed to have."

"Why, Phœbe, I am part Irish! My mother's maiden name was McKnight. David and I still have a few drops of the Irish blood in us, I suppose."

"I just knew it! I'm glad. I adore the whimsical way the Irish have, and I like their sense of humor. I guess that's one of the reasons I like you better than other people I know and perhaps that's why David is jolly and different from Phares. Ah," she added roguishly, "I think it's a pity Phares hasn't some Irish blood in him. He's so solemn he seldom sees a joke."

"But he's a good boy and he thinks a lot of you. He's just a little too quiet. But he's a good preacher and very bright."

"Yes, he's so good that I'm ashamed of myself when I say mean things about him. I like him, but people with more life are more interesting."

"Hello, who's this you like?" David's hearty voice burst upon them.

Phœbe turned and saw him standing in the sunlight of the open door. The thought flashed upon her, "How big and strong he is!"

He wore brown corduroys, a blue chambray shirt slightly open at the throat, heavy shoes. His face was already tanned by the wind and sun, his hands rough from contact with soil and farming implements, his dark hair rumpled where he had pulled the big straw hat from his head, but there was an odor of fresh spring earth about him, a boyish wholesomeness in his face, that attracted the girl as she looked at his frame in the doorway.

There was a flash of white teeth, a twinkle in his dark eyes, as he asked, "What did I hear you say, Phœbe—that you like me?"

"Indeed not! I wouldn't think of liking anybody who deceived me as you have done. All these years you have left me under the impression that you are Pennsylvania Dutch and now Mother Bab says you are part Irish."

"Little saucebox! What about yourself? You can't make me believe that you are pure, unadulterated Pennsylvania Dutch. There's some alien blood in you, by the ways of you. Have you seen Phares this afternoon?" he asked irrelevantly.

"Phares? No. Why?"

"He went down past the field some time ago. Said he's going to Greenwald and means to stop and ask you to go to a sale with him next week. He said you mentioned some time ago that you'd like to go to a real old-fashioned one and he heard of one coming off next week and thought you might like to go."

"I surely want to go. Don't you want to come, too, David? And Mother Bab?"

But David shook his head. "And spoil Phares's party," he said. "Phares wouldn't thank us."

Phœbe shrugged her shoulders. "Ach, David Eby, you're silly! Just as though I want to go to a sale all alone with Phares! He can take the big carriage and take us all."

"He can but he won't want to." David showed an irritating wisdom. "When I invite you to come on a party with me I won't want Phares tagging after, either. Two's company."

"Two's boredom sometimes," she said so ambiguously that the man laughed heartily and Mother Bab smiled in amusement.

"Come now, Phœbe," David said, "just because you put your hair up you mustn't think you can rule us all and don grown-up airs."

"Then you do notice things! I thought you were blind. You are downright mean, David Eby! When you wore your first pair of long pants I noticed it right away and made a fuss about them and it takes you ten minutes to see that my hair is up instead of hanging in a silly braid down my back."

"I saw it first thing, Phœbe. That was mean—I'm sorry——"

"You look it," she said sceptically.

"I'm sorry," he repeated, "to see the braid go, though you look fine this way. I liked that long braid ever since the day I braided it, the day you played prima donna. Remember?"

The girl flushed, then was vexed at her embarrassment and changed suddenly to the old, appealing Phœbe.

"I remember, Davie. You were my salvation that day, you and Mother Bab."

Before they could answer she added with seeming innocency, yet with a swift glance into the face of the farmer boy, "I must go now so I'll be home when Phares comes to invite me to that sale. I'm going with him; I'm wild to go."

"Yes?" David said slowly.

"Yes," she repeated, a teasing look in her eyes.

"Mommie, isn't she fine?" David said after Phœbe was gone and he lingered in the house.

"Mighty fine. But she is so different from the general run of girls; she's so lively and bright and sweet, so sensitive to all impressions. She's anxious to get to the city to study music. It would be a wonderful experience for her—and yet——"

"And yet——" echoed David, then fell into silence.

Mother Bab was thinking of her boy and Phœbe, of their gay comradeship. How friendly they were, how well-mated they appeared to be, how appreciative of each other. Could they ever care for each other in a deeper way? Did the preacher care for the playmate of his childhood as she thought David was beginning to care?

"Well, I must go again, mommie. I came in for a drink at the pump and heard you and Phœbe. Now I must hustle for I have a lot to do before sundown—ach, why aren't we rich!"

"Do you wish for that?"

"Certainly I do. Not wealthy; just to have enough so we needn't lie awake wondering if the dry spell or the wet spell or the hail will ruin the crops. I wish I could find an Aladdin's lamp."

"Davie"—the smile faded from her face—"don't get the money craze. Money isn't everything. This farm is paid for and we can always make a comfortable living. Money isn't all."

"No, but—but it means everything sometimes to a young, single fellow. But don't you worry; the crops are fine this year, so far."

The mother did not forget his words at once. "It must be," she thought, "that David wants Phœbe and feels he must have more money before he can ask her to marry him. Will men never learn that girls who are worth getting are not looking so much for money but the man. The young can't see the depth and fullness of love. I've tried to teach David, but I suppose there's some things he must learn for himself."

CHAPTER X

AN OLD-FASHIONED COUNTRY SALE

A week later Phares and Phœbe drove into the barnyard of a farm six miles from Greenwald, where the old-fashioned sale was scheduled to be held.

"We are not the first, after all," said the preacher as he saw the number of conveyances in and about the barnyard. He smiled good-humoredly as he led the way—he could afford to smile when he was with Phœbe.

All about the big yard of the farm were placed articles to be sold at public auction. It was a miscellaneous collection. A cradle with miniature puffy feather pillows, straw tick and an old patchwork quilt of pink and white calico stood near an old wood-stove which bore the inscription, Conowingo Furnace. Corn-husk shoe-mats, a quilting frame, rocking-chairs, two spinning-wheels, copper kettles, rolls of hand-woven rag carpet, old oval hat-boxes and an old chest stood about a huge table which was laden with jars of jellies. Chests, filled with linens and antique woolen coverlets, afforded a resting place for the fortunate ones who had arrived earliest. A few antique chairs and tables, a mahogany highboy in excellent condition and an antique corner-cupboard of wild-cherry wood occupied prominent places among the collection. Truly, the sale warranted the attention it was receiving.

"I'd like to bid on something—I'm going to do it!" Phœbe said as they looked about. "When I was a little girl and went to sales with Aunt Maria I coaxed to bid, just for the excitement of bidding. But she always made me tell what I wanted and then she bid on it."

"What do you want to buy?" asked the preacher.

"Oh, I don't know. I don't want any apple-butter in crocks, or any chairs. Oh, I'll have some fun, Phares! I'll bid on the third article they put up for sale! I heard a man say the dishes are going to be sold first, so I'll probably get a cracked plate or a saucer without a cup, but whatever it is, the third article is going to be mine."

"That is rather rash," warned Phares. "It may be a bed or a chest."

"You can't scare me. I'm going to have some real thrills at this sale."

The preacher entered into the spirit of the girl and smiled at her promise to bid on the third thing put up for sale.

"Oh, look at the highboy," she exclaimed to him.

"Do you like it?" he asked.

"Yes. See how it's inlaid with hollywood and cherry and how fine the lines of it are! I wonder how much it will bring. But Aunt Maria'd scold if I brought any furniture home, so I can't buy it."

"The price will depend upon the number of bidders and the size of their pocketbooks. If any dealers in antiques are here it may run way up. We used to buy homespun linen and fine old furniture very cheap at sales, but the antique dealers changed that."

By that time the number of people was steadily increasing. They came singly and in groups, in carriages, farm wagons, automobiles and afoot. Some of the curious went about examining each article in the motley collection in the yard.

Phœbe watched it all with an amused smile; finally she broke into merry laughter.

Phares looked up inquiringly: "What is it?"

"This is great sport! I haven't been to a good sale for several years. That old man has knocked his fist upon every chair and table, has tested every piece of furniture, has opened all the bureau drawers, even the case of the old clock, and just a moment ago he rocked the cradle furiously to convince himself that it is in good working condition. Here he comes with a pewter plate in his hand—let's hear what he has to say about it."

The old man's cracked harsh voice rose above the confusion of other sounds as he leaned against a table near Phœbe and Phares and spoke to another man:

"Here now, Eph, is one of them pewter plates that folks fuss so about just now, and I hear they put them in their dinin'-rooms along the wall! Why, when I was a boy my granny had a lot of 'em and we'd knock 'em around any way. Ha, ha," he laughed loudly, "I can tell you a good one, Eph, about one of them pewter dishes."

He slapped the plate against his knee, but the thud was instantly drowned by his quick, "Ach, Jimminy, I hit myself pretty hard that time! But I'll tell you about it, Eph. You heard of the fellows from the city who go around the country hunting up old relics, all old truck, and sell it again in the city? Well, one of them fellows come to my house the other week and asked if I had anything old-fashioned I would sell. Now if Lizzie'd been home we might got rid of some of the old things we have on the garret, but I was alone and I didn't know what I dared sell—you know how the women is. So I said, 'What kind of old things do you want?'

"'Oh,' he said, 'I buy old furniture, dishes, linen, pewter——'

"'Pewter?' I said. 'Who wants that?'

"'There is a great demand for it,' he said, 'and I will give you a good price for any you have.'

"'Well,' I laughed, 'I have just one piece of pewter.'

"'Where is it?'

"'Why, the cats have been eating out of it for a few years.'

"'May I see it?' he asks.

"So I took him out to the barn and showed him the big pewter bowl the cats eat out of and he said, 'I'll give you fifty cents for that dish.'

"Gosh, I said to him, 'Mister, I was just fooling with you. I know you don't want a cat-dish.'

"But he said again, 'I'll give you fifty cents for that dish.'

"So when I saw that he really meant it and wanted the dish I wrapped the old pewter dish in a paper and he gave me half a dollar for it. When I told Lizzie about it she laughed good and said the city folks must be dumb if they want pewter dishes when you can buy such nice ones for ten cents. Yes, Eph, that's the fellow's going to auctioneer. He's a good one, you bet; he keeps things lively all the time. All his folks is good talkers. Lizzie says his mom can talk the legs off an iron pot. But then he needs a good tongue in this business; it takes a lot of wind to be an auctioneer, specially at a big sale like this. He says it's going to be a wonderful sale, that he ain't had one like it for years. There's things here belonged to the family for three generations, been handed down and handed down and now to-day it'll get scattered all over Lancaster County, mebbe further. This saving up things and not using 'em is all nonsense. I tell Lizzie we'll use what we got and get new when it's worn out and not let a lot back for the young ones to fight over or other people to buy."

Here the auctioneer climbed upon a big box, clapped his hands and called loudly, "Attention, attention! This sale is about to begin. We have here a collection of fine things, all in good condition. The terms of the sale are cash. Now, folks, bid up fast and talk loud when you bid so I can hear you. We have here some of the finest antique dishes in the country, also some furniture that can't be duplicated in any store to-day. We'll begin on this cherry table."

He lifted a spindle-legged table in the air and went on talking.

"Now that's a fine table to begin with! All solid cherry, no screws loose—and that's more than you can say about some people—now what's bid for this table? Fine and good as the day it came out of a good workman's shop; no scratches on it—the Brubaker people knew how to take care of furniture. Who bids? How much for it do you bid? Fifty cents—fifty, all right—make it sixty—sixty cents I'm bid. Sixty, sixty, sixty—seventy—go ahead, eighty—go on—ninety, one dollar, one dollar ten, twenty, thirty—keep on—one dollar thirty, make it forty, forty, forty, forty, I have a dollar forty for this table—all done? Going—all done—all done?"

All was said in one breathless succession of words. He paused an instant to gather fresh impetus, then resumed, "All done—any more? Gone at a dollar forty to——"

"Lizzie Brubaker."

"Sold to Lizzie Brubaker."

"There," whispered the preacher to Phœbe, "that's one."

She smiled and nodded her head.

"Here now," called the auctioneer, "here's a fine set of chairs. Bid on them; wink to me if you don't want to call out. My wife said she don't care how many ladies wink to me this afternoon at this sale, but after that she won't have it—now then; go ahead! Give me one of the chairs, Sam, so the people can see it—ah, ain't that a beauty! Six in all, all solid wood, too, none of your cane seats that you have to be afraid to sit in. All solid wood, and every one alike, all painted green and every one with fine hand-painted flowers on the back. Where can you beat such chairs? Don't make them any more these days, real antiques they are! Bid up now, friends; how much a piece? The six go together, it would be a shame to part them. Fifteen cents did I hear?—Say, I'm ashamed to take a bid like that! Twenty, that's a little better—thirty, thirty, forty over here? Forty cents I have, fifty, sixty, seventy, seventy-five, eighty, eighty, eighty cents I'm bid; I'm bid eighty cents—make it ninety—ninety I'm bid, make it a dollar—ninety, ninety—all done at ninety? Guess we'll let Jonas Erb have them at ninety cents a piece, and real bargains they are!"

"Here's where I bid," said Phœbe, her cheeks rosy from excitement.

"Shall I release you from your promise?" offered the preacher.

"No, I'll bid."

"Attention," called the auctioneer. "Attention, everybody! Here we have a real antique, something worth bidding on!"

Phœbe held her breath.

"Here now, Sam, give it a lift so everybody can see—ah, there you are!"

He shouted the last words as two men held above the crowd—the old wooden cradle!

Phœbe groaned and looked at Phares—he was smiling. The old aversion to ridicule swelled in her; he should not have reason to laugh at her; she would show him that she was equal to the occasion—she would bid on the cradle!

"Start it, hurry up, somebody. How much is bid for the cradle? Sam here says it's been in the Brubaker family for years and years. Think of all the babies that were rocked to sleep in it—it's a real relic."

Phœbe, unacquainted with the value of cradles, was silently endeavoring to determine the proper amount for a first bid. She was relieved to hear a woman's voice call, "Twenty-five cents."

"Twenty-five I have, twenty-five," called the auctioneer. "Make it thirty."

"Thirty," said Phœbe.

"Forty," came from the other woman.

"Make it fifty, Miss." He pointed a fat finger at Phœbe.

"Fifty," she responded.

"Fifty, fifty, anybody make it sixty? Fifty cents—all done at fifty? Then it goes at fifty cents to"—Phœbe repeated her name—"to Phœbe Metz."

He proceeded with the sale. Phœbe turned triumphantly to the preacher—"I kept my promise."

"You did," he said. "The cradle is yours—what are you going to do with it?"