elong
to 'em, on their hands to support. She's clean crazy to do it.

"Rose, you'll have to finish the dishes and clean up, if it _is_
Saturday, for I'm a goin' round to Miss Pryor's. I can't keep that to
myself over Sunday, not if a whole passel of ministers was to come here
to dinner, and I love my reputation for neatness, entirely."

It was a fearful responsibility, but now that she had taken it, or
rather had it forced upon her by fate, Clemence felt thankful that she
was thought worthy of the charge. She began to love the little, helpless
creature, who looked to her now for every good. She took pleasure in
combing the soft, brown hair, that had, hitherto, been twisted into an
awkward knot, into pretty, graceful curls, and it would be hard to
believe that the little, slender, sable-clad child, with the serious,
brown eyes, that always followed Clemence with looks of love in their
yearning, amber depths, could possibly be the same wild, sly, little
Ruth Lynn, whom we first knew.

Notwithstanding Mrs. Wynn's adverse prediction, Clemence's "strange
freak," as they called it in the little village, was not condemned by
every one. There were a few liberal-minded ones, who saw at once how the
case stood, and resolved to uphold the girl in her course, though they
feared for the future, in which there was the possibility of failure.
And, much to Clemence's astonishment, the gallant Philemon W. Strain,
editor, came out with a glowing account of the whole affair in the next
issue of the Clarion, in a three column article, headed "Ruth, the
Village Child," complimenting the young schoolmistress in such
high-flown terms, that a rival editor, who read it, thought that she
must be of a literary turn, and wrote to her to solicit contributions to
his paper, and another authority in a neighboring village, wanted to
write her life, and was only pacified by being allowed to dedicate a
poem to our young heroine, which, happily for her nerves, was never
published, for being sent by the ambitious strippling to a popular
magazine, was only heard of again under the head of "respectfully
declined," accompanied by some severe and cutting remarks, to the effect
that the writer had better look to his grammar and orthography, which
uncalled for sarcasm, cruelly, but effectually extinguished what might,
perhaps, have been a light, that, in the future, might had illumined the
world with its effulgent rays.

CHAPTER VII.

Sabbath in t