n could people
the world with pleasant features and pleasant prospects.

The cattle were driven daily to the ponds, half a mile away, for water,
and if the ice was thick and the axe-handle benumbing to the mittened
hands as they chopped the holes for the tottering animals to drink from,
there was the prospect of a slide on the uncut portions of the ice later;
and as the plucky youngsters followed the cattle home they dreamed of
skates to be obtained in the dim future, and tried to run fast enough to
keep warm. The blessing of childhood is that it cannot be cheated of its
visions, and the blood of adolescence was coursing riotously through the
veins of the daughter of the Farnshaw house. If her hands were cold when
she returned to the barnyard, after watering the cattle, she beat them
about her shoulders or held them against the shrunken flank of some dumb
animal, or blew her breath through the fingers of her knitted mittens; but
her thoughts were of other things.

It is an old saying that "God helps them who help themselves," and in the
case of Lizzie Farnshaw the axiom became a living truth. While the rest of
her family suffered and magnified their sufferings, she, by a vivid
imagination, placed herself in the path of fortune and obtained the thing
she demanded. The simple country schoolhouse that year, dreary and
cheerless enough to the pert Miss who had come out from Topeka to teach
there, and incidentally to collect twenty-five dollars a month from the
school board, was to be the scene of the initial change in Lizzie
Farnshaw's life.

Verily, God helps them who help themselves, and Lizzie Farnshaw proved the
old saw by laying hold of and absorbing every new idea and mannerism of
which the new teacher was arrogantly possessed--absorbed them, but
transmuted them, winnowing out the coarse, the sarcastic, the unkind, and
making of what was left a substance of finer fibre.

The number of children in the Prairie Home school that year was limited to
five, the rest having departed for the indefinable land known as the
"East." Three of these children came from the Farnshaw home and the other
two from the new neighbours, the Cranes, on the Hansen place.

Sadie Crane hated the new teacher with all the might that her pinched
little twelve-year-old body could bring to bear. She saw only the
snippish, opinionated, young peacock, and the self-assurance which came
from the empty-headed ability to tie a ribbon well. She was so o