o very pretty."

"Then Ben Simonds is your beau," said Ellen, reflectively.

"Yes, I guess he is," admitted Floretta.

That night, amid much wonder and tender ridicule, Ellen told her
mother and Aunt Eva, and her father, that Ben Simonds was Floretta's
beau, and Granville Joy was hers. But Andrew laughed doubtfully.

"I don't want that little thing to get such ideas into her head yet
a while," he told Fanny afterwards, but she only laughed at him,
seeing nothing but the childish play of the thing; but he, being a
man, saw deeper.

However, Ellen's fondest new love was not for any of her little
mates, but for her school-teacher. To her the child's heart went out
in worship. All through the spring she offered her violets--violets
gathered laboriously after school in the meadow back of her
grandmother's house. She used to skip from hillock to hillock of
marsh grass with wary steps, lest she might slip and wet her feet in
the meadow ooze and incur her mother's displeasure, for Fanny, in
spite of her worship of the child, could speak with no uncertain
voice. She pulled up handfuls of the flowers, gleaming blue in the
dark-green hollows. Later she carried roses from the choice bush in
the yard, and, later, pears from her grandmother's tree. She used to
watch for Miss Mitchell at her gate and run to meet her, and seize
her hand and walk at her side, blushing with delight. Miss Mitchell
lived not far from Ellen, in a tidy white house with a handsome
smoke-tree on one side of the front walk and a willow with
upside-down branches on the other. Miss Mitchell had been born and
brought up in this house, but she had been teaching school in a
distant town ever since Ellen's day, so they had never been
acquainted before she went to school. Miss Mitchell lived alone with
her mother, who was an old friend of Mrs. Zelotes. Ellen privately
thought her rather better-looking than her own grandmother, though
her admiration was based upon wholly sentimental reasons. Old Mrs.
Mitchell might have earned more money in a museum of freaks than her
daughter in a district school. She was a mountain of rotundity, a
conjunction of palpitating spheres, but the soul that dwelt in this
painfully ponderous body was as mellow with affection and kindliness
as a ripe pear, and the voice that proceeded from her ever-smiling
lips was a hoarse and dove-like coo of love. Ellen at first started
a little aghast at this gigantic fleshliness, this general sloug