the room forming a sort of unique centre-piece.

This and more I accepted, wearily, and then sank down by the bed and
cried. Outside, before the one small window, stood a peach tree.
Afterward, when this had grown to be a very dear little room to me, I
looked out cheerfully through its branches, warm with sunshine, and
fragrant with bloom; but now it was bare and ghostly, and, as the wind
blew, one forlorn twig trailed back and forth across the window.

For an hour or more after my head touched the pillow, I lay awake
listening to the unaccustomed sound of the surf and those skeleton
fingers tapping at the pane.

CHAPTER IV.

THE TURKEY MOGUL ARRIVES.

I studied Becky Weir in school, the next day, with special interest. She
was a girl of seventeen or eighteen, with the stately, substantial
presence of one of nature's own goddesses. She had a fresh, constant
color in her cheeks, a pure, low forehead, and eyes that were clear,
gray, and large, but with a strangely appealing, helplessly animal
expression in them, I fancied, as she lifted them, oft-times, to mine.
She was distinguished among my young disciples by the faithful, though
evidently labored and wearisome attention, she gave to her books.

Her glance, bent on some small wretch who was misbehaving, had a
peculiarly significant force. The little ones all seemed to love her and
to stand rather in awe of her, too.

Entering the school-room in the morning, she discovered a network of
strings, which one Lemuel Biddy had artfully laid between the desks,
intending thereby to waylay and prostrate his human victim, and stooping
down, she boxed the miscreant, not cruelly but effectively, on the ears.
I was surprised to see that the boy seemed to regard this infliction as
the simple and natural award of justice, bowed his head and wept
penitently, and was subdued for some time afterward.

To me, whose earliest years had been guided and illuminated on the
principle that reason and persuasion alone are to be used in the training
of the tender twig, this little occurrence afforded food for serious
wonder and reflection. I doubted if the logic of the sages or the wooing
of the celestial seraphim would have wrought with such convincing power
on the mind and ears of Lemuel Biddy.

If Rebecca perchance, after painfully protracted exertions, succeeded in
working out some simple problem in arithmetic, her slate containing the
solution was freely handed about among h