Threadgale, Draper and Haberdasher. Jenny hoped they would go in through
the shop itself, but Mrs. Threadgale opened a door at the side and took
them upstairs to a big airy parlor that seemed to Jenny's first glance
all sunbeams and lace. Having been afforded a glimpse of Paradise, they
were taken downstairs again into the back parlor, which would have been
very dull had it not looked out on to a green garden sloping down to a
small stream.

Uncle James, with pale, square face and quiet voice, came in from the
shop to greet them. Jenny thought he talked funny with his broad
Hampshire vowels. Ethel, the maid, came in, too, with her peach-bloom
cheeks and creamy neck and dewy crimson mouth. Jenny compared her with
"our Rube," greatly to our Rube's disadvantage.

Mrs. Raeburn stayed a week, and Jenny said good-bye without any feeling
of home-sickness. She liked her new uncle and aunt. There were no
pasty-faced cousins, and Ethel was very nice. She was not sent to the
National School. Such a course would have been derogatory to Mr. and
Mrs. Threadgale's social position. So she went to a funny old school at
the top of the town kept by an old lady called Miss Wilberforce--a dear
old lady with white caps and pale blue ribbons and a big pair of
tortoise-shell spectacles. The school was a little gray house with three
gables and diamond lattices and a door studded with great nails over
which was an inscription that said, "Mrs. Wilberforce's School, 1828."

In the class-room on one side was heard a perpetual humming of bees
among the wallflowers in the front garden, and through the windows on
the far side, which looked away over the open country, floated the
distant tinkle of sheep-bells. All along one side hung rows of cloaks
and hats, and all over the other walls hung pictures of sheep and cows
and dogs and angels and turnips and wheat and barley and Negroes and Red
Indians: there were also bunches of dried grasses and glass cases full
of butterflies and birds' eggs and fossils, and along the window-sills
were pots of geraniums. On her desk Miss Wilberforce had an enormous
cane, which she never used, and a bowl of bluebells or wild flowers of
the season and a big ink-horn and quill pens and books and papers which
fluttered about the room on a windy day. There was a dunce's stool with
a fool's-cap beside it, and a blackboard full of the simplest little
addition sums. All the children's desks were chipped and carved and
inked w