the last twelve hours, but she put out an obedient hand and the two
withdrew.

Now Miss Dearborn was, I fear, a very indifferent teacher. Dr. Moses
always said so, and Libbie Moses, who wanted her school, said it was
a pity she hadn't enjoyed more social advantages in her youth. Libbie
herself had taken music lessons in Portland; and spent a night at the
Profile House in the White Mountains, and had visited her sister in
Lowell, Massachusetts. These experiences gave her, in her own mind, and
in the mind of her intimate friends, a horizon so boundless that her
view of smaller, humbler matters was a trifle distorted.

Miss Dearborn's stock in trade was small, her principal virtues being
devotion to children and ability to gain their love, and a power of
evolving a schoolroom order so natural, cheery, serene, and peaceful
that it gave the beholder a certain sense of being in a district heaven.
She was poor in arithmetic and weak in geometry, but if you gave her a
rose, a bit of ribbon, and a seven-by-nine looking-glass she could make
herself as pretty as a pink in two minutes.

Safely sheltered behind the pines, Miss Dearborn began to practice
mysterious feminine arts. She flew at Rebecca's tight braids, opened
the strands and rebraided them loosely; bit and tore the red, white,
and blue ribbon in two and tied the braids separately. Then with nimble
fingers she pulled out little tendrils of hair behind the ears and
around the nape of the neck. After a glance of acute disapproval
directed at the stiff balloon skirt she knelt on the ground and gave
a strenuous embrace to Rebecca's knees, murmuring, between her hugs,
"Starch must be cheap at the brick house!"

This particular line of beauty attained, there ensued great pinchings of
ruffles, her fingers that could never hold a ferrule nor snap children's
ears being incomparable fluting-irons.

Next the sash was scornfully untied and tightened to suggest something
resembling a waist. The chastened bows that had been squat, dowdy,
spiritless, were given tweaks, flirts, bracing little pokes and dabs,
till, acknowledging a master hand, they stood up, piquant, pert, smart,
alert!

Pride of bearing was now infused into the flattened lace at the neck,
and a pin (removed at some sacrifice from her own toilette) was darned
in at the back to prevent any cowardly lapsing. The short white cotton
gloves that called attention to the tanned wrist and arms were stripped
off and put i