the eyebrows with learning for one thing,--useless kinds and
all,--going to have good clothes, and a good income. Everything

that was in his power should be right, because there would always
be lurking in the background the things he never could help--the

mother and the poorhouse.
So he went away, and, although at Squire Bean's invitation he

came back the first year for two brief visits at Christmas and
Easter, he was little seen in Riverboro, for Mr. Ladd finally

found him a place where he could make his vacations profitable
and learn bookkeeping at the same time.

The visits in Riverboro were tantalizing rather than pleasant. He
was invited to two parties, but he was all the time conscious of

his shirt-collar, and he was sure that his "pants" were not the
proper thing, for by this time his ideals of dress had attained

an almost unrealizable height. As for his shoes, he felt that he
walked on carpets as if they were furrows and he were propelling

a plow or a harrow before him. They played Drop the Handkerchief
and Copenhagen at the parties, but he had not had the audacity to

kiss Emma Jane, which was bad enough, but Jimmy had and did,
which was infinitely worse! The sight of James Watson's unworthy

and over-ambitious lips on Emma Jane's pink cheek almost
destroyed his faith in an overruling Providence.

After the parties were over he went back to his old room in
Squire Bean's shed chamber. As he lay in bed his thoughts

fluttered about Emma Jane as swallows circle around the eaves.
The terrible sickness of hopeless handicapped love kept him

awake. Once he crawled out of bed in the night, lighted the lamp,
and looked for his mustache, remembering that he had seen a

suspicion of down on his rival's upper lip. He rose again half an
hour later, again lighted the lamp, put a few drops of oil on his

hair, and brushed it violently for several minutes. Then he went
back to bed, and after making up his mind that he would buy a

dulcimer and learn to play on it so that he would be more
attractive at parties, and outshine his rival in society as he

had aforetime in athletics, he finally sank into a troubled
slumber.

Those days, so full of hope and doubt and torture, seemed
mercifully unreal now, they lay so far back in the past--six or

eight years, in fact, which is a lifetime to the lad of
twenty--and meantime he had conquered many of the adverse

circumstances that had threatened to cloud his career.
Abijah Flagg was a true child of his native State. Something of

the same timber that Maine puts into her forests, something of
the same strength and resisting power that she works into her

rocks, goes into her sons and daughters; and at twenty Abijah was
going to take his fate in his hand and ask Mr. Perkins, the rich

blacksmith, if, after a suitable period of probation (during
which he would further prepare himself for his exalted destiny),

he might marry the fair Emma Jane, sole heiress of the Perkins
house and fortunes.

III
This was boy and girl love, calf love, perhaps, though even that

may develop into something larger, truer, and finer; but not so
far away were other and very different hearts growing and

budding, each in its own way. There was little Miss Dearborn, the
pretty school teacher, drifting into a foolish alliance because

she did not agree with her stepmother at home; there was Herbert
Dunn, valedictorian of his class, dazzled by Huldah Meserve, who

like a glowworm "shone afar off bright, but looked at near, had
neither heat nor light."

There was sweet Emily Maxwell, less than thirty still, with most
of her heart bestowed in the wrong quarter. She was toiling on at

the Wareham school, living as unselfish a life as a nun in a
convent; lavishing the mind and soul of her, the heart and body

of her, on her chosen work. How many women give themselves thus,
consciously and unconsciously; and, though they themselves miss

the joys and compensations of mothering their own little twos and
threes, God must be grateful to them for their mothering of the

hundreds which make them so precious in His regenerating
purposes.

Then there was Adam Ladd, waiting at thirty-five for a girl to
grow a little older, simply because he could not find one already

grown who suited his somewhat fastidious and exacting tastes.
"I'll not call Rebecca perfection," he quoted once, in a letter

to Emily Maxwell,--"I'll not call her perfection, for that's a
post, afraid to move. But she's a dancing sprig of the tree next

it."
When first she appeared on his aunt's piazza in North Riverboro

and insisted on selling him a large quantity of very inferior
soap in order that her friends, the Simpsons, might possess a

premium in the shape of a greatly needed banquet lamp, she had
riveted his attention. He thought all the time that he enjoyed

talking with her more than with any woman alive, and he had never
changed his opinion. She always caught what he said as if it were

a ball tossed to her, and sometimes her mind, as through it his
thoughts came back to him, seemed like a prism which had dyed

them with deeper colors.
Adam Ladd always called Rebecca in his heart his little Spring.

His boyhood had been lonely and unhappy. That was the part of
life he had missed, and although it was the full summer of

success and prosperity with him now, he found his lost youth only
in her.

She was to him--how shall I describe it?
Do you remember an early day in May with budding leaf, warm

earth, tremulous air, and changing, willful sky--how new it
seemed? How fresh and joyous beyond all explaining?

Have you lain with half-closed eyes where the flickering of
sunlight through young leaves, the song of birds and brook and

the fragrance of wild flowers combined to charm your senses, and
you felt the sweetness and grace of nature as never before?

Rebecca was springtide to Adam's thirsty heart. She was blithe
youth incarnate; she was music--an Aeolian harp that every

passing breeze woke to some whispering little tune; she was a
changing, iridescent joy-bubble; she was the shadow of a leaf

dancing across a dusty floor. No bough of his thought could be so
bare but she somehow built a nest in it and evoked life where

none was before.
And Rebecca herself?

She had been quite unconscious of all this until very lately, and
even now she was but half awakened; searching among her childish

instincts and her girlish dreams for some Ariadne thread that
should guide her safely through the labyrinth of her new

sensations.
For the moment she was absorbed, or thought she was, in the

little love story of Abijah and Emma Jane, but in reality, had
she realized it, that love story served chiefly as a basis of

comparison for a possible one of her own, later on.