a sense of shame for her rudeness by the sudden entrance of her
aunt.

"How d' do?" said Mrs. Wackernagel in her brisk, businesslike tone.
"D'you want supper?"

"I am the applicant for the New Canaan school. I want to get board for
the winter here, if I can--and in case I'm elected."

"Well, I say! Tillie! D'you hear that? Why us we all heard you was
goin' to Jonas Hershey's."

"They decided it wasn't convenient to take me and sent me here."

"Now think! If that wasn't like Sister Jennie yet! All right!" she
announced conclusively. "We can accommodate you to satisfaction, I
guess."

"Have you any other boarders?" the young man inquired.

"No reg'lar boarders--except, to be sure, the Doc; and he's lived with
us it's comin' fifteen years, I think, or how long, till November
a'ready. It's just our own fam'ly here and my niece where helps with
the work, and the Doc. We have a many to meals though, just passing
through that way, you know. We don't often have more 'n one reg'lar
boarder at oncet, so we just make 'em at home still, like as if they
was one of us. Now YOU," she hospitably concluded, "we'll lay in our
best bed. We don't lay 'em in the best bed unless they're some
clean-lookin'."

Tillie noticed as her aunt talked that while the young man listened
with evident interest, his eyes moved about the room, taking in every
detail of it. To Tillie's mind, this hotel parlor was so "pleasing to
the eye" as to constitute one of those Temptations of the Enemy against
which her New Mennonite faith prescribed most rigid discipline. She
wondered whether the stranger did not think it very handsome.

The arrangement of the room was evidently, like Jonas Hershey's
flower-beds, the work of a mathematical genius. The chairs all stood
with their stiff backs squarely against the wall, the same number
facing each other from the four sides of the apartment. Photographs in
narrow oval frames, six or eight, formed another oval, all equidistant
from the largest, which occupied the dead center, not only of this
group, but of the wall from which it depended. The books on the square
oak table, which stood in the exact middle of the floor, were arranged
in cubical piles in the same rigid order. Tillie saw the new teacher's
glance sweep their titles: "Touching Incidents, and Remarkable Answers
to Prayer"; "From Tannery to White House"; "Gems of Religious Thought,"
by Talmage; "History of the Galveston Horror; Illustrated"; "Platform