parent stolidity made her perhaps the least interesting of
all the girls. Perhaps this was in part owing to the fact that one is
not likely to be very talkative in a strange language.

But Gretchen had a heart, although no one in Squantown had yet found,
or cared to find, it. It was safe at home in the fatherland, where the
house-mother and father had as much as they could do to put enough black
bread to support life into the mouths of the five little children, too
young to do as she had done, when she accompanied a neighbor's family,
who were emigrating to seek their fortune in the New World. These
neighbors had gone to the far West, and not caring to be burdened with a
possibly unproductive member of their party, had left the little girl in
the hands of a German employment agency, through which she had found her
way to Squantown Mills.

Gretchen had many homesick hours when she would have given a great deal
more than she possessed to be at home again sharing the poverty and
hardships of the Old World, but she expressed her feelings to no one.
Indeed, she knew no one to whom she could have expressed them. She did
her day's work faithfully, receiving her regular payment of fifty cents,
and occasionally a little more, which little she resolutely put away at
the bottom of her box, to be sent home to her mother and the little
ones when there should be a good opportunity.

But now Gretchen was absent from her work one, two, three, four days. It
was Miss Peters's duty to report all absentees on Saturday night, and
she did so after the hands had been paid off and gone home. The
book-keeper noted the absence in his pages, asked if work was so
pressing as to make the appointment of a substitute necessary or
advisable, and being answered in the negative quite forgot to inform his
employer of the girl's absence.

But when Sunday came, and Gretchen was absent from the place in the
class which she had so regularly occupied, it was a different thing.
Etta, among her other activities, had from the first been a good visitor
of absentees. Indeed, when her scholars lived with their families, as in
the case of Katie and one or two of the other girls, she had made more
visits and laid down the law more than was quite agreeable in all cases.
Now, with her newly awakened sense of responsibility toward the immortal
souls placed under her charge, she had begun to watch over them as one
who must give account of their souls. She had several