at any rate, while I
am so happy and free and rested. Look at the pebbles in the bottom of
the pool, Miss Emily, so round and smooth and shining."

"Yes, but where did they get that beautiful polish, that satin skin,
that lovely shape, Rebecca? Not in the still pool lying on the sands.
It was never there that their angles were rubbed off and their rough
surfaces polished, but in the strife and warfare of running waters.
They have jostled against other pebbles, dashed against sharp rocks,
and now we look at them and call them beautiful."

"If Fate had not made somebody a teacher,
She might have been, oh! such a splendid preacher!"

rhymed Rebecca. "Oh! if I could only think and speak as you do!" she
sighed. "I am so afraid I shall never get education enough to make a
good writer."

"You could worry about plenty of other things to better advantage,"
said Miss Maxwell, a little scornfully. "Be afraid, for instance, that
you won't understand human nature; that you won't realize the beauty of
the outer world; that you may lack sympathy, and thus never be able to
read a heart; that your faculty of expression may not keep pace with
your ideas,--a thousand things, every one of them more important to the
writer than the knowledge that is found in books. AEsop was a Greek
slave who could not even write down his wonderful fables; yet all the
world reads them."

"I didn't know that," said Rebecca, with a half sob. "I didn't know
anything until I met you!"

"You will only have had a high school course, but the most famous
universities do not always succeed in making men and women. When I long
to go abroad and study, I always remember that there were three great
schools in Athens and two in Jerusalem, but the Teacher of all teachers
came out of Nazareth, a little village hidden away from the bigger,
busier world."

"Mr. Ladd says that you are almost wasted on Wareham," said Rebecca
thoughtfully.

"He is wrong; my talent is not a great one, but no talent is wholly
wasted unless its owner chooses to hide it in a napkin. Remember that
of your own gifts, Rebecca; they may not be praised of men, but they
may cheer, console, inspire, perhaps, when and where you least expect.
The brimming glass that overflows its own rim moistens the earth about
it."

"Did you ever hear of The Rose of Joy?" asked Rebecca, after a long
silence.

"Yes, of course; where did you see it?"

"On the outside of a book in the library."

"I sa