gewood!

Graduation will surely take me a little out of "the hollow,"--make me
a little more like the soaring eagle, gazing at the whole wide world
beneath him while he wheels "slow as in sleep." But whether or not,
I'll try not to be a discontented shepherd, but remember what Mr. Baxter
said, that the little strip that I see "twixt the hill and the sky" is
able to hold all of earth and all of heaven, if only I have the eyes to
see it.

Rebecca Rowena Randall.

Wareham Female Seminary, December 187--.

Eleventh Chronicle. ABIJAH THE BRAVE AND THE FAIR EMMAJANE

I

"A warrior so bold and a maiden so bright
Conversed as they sat on the green.
They gazed at each other in tender delight.
Alonzo the brave was the name of the knight,
And the maid was the fair Imogene.

"Alas!' said the youth, 'since tomorrow I go
To fight in a far distant land,
Your tears for my absence soon ceasing to flow,
Some other will court you, and you will bestow
On a wealthier suitor your hand.'

'Oh, hush these suspicions!' Fair Imogene said,
"So hurtful to love and to me!
For if you be living, or if you be dead,
I swear by the Virgin that none in your stead
Shall the husband of Imogene be!'

Ever since she was eight years old Rebecca had wished to be eighteen,
but now that she was within a month of that awe-inspiring and
long-desired age she wondered if, after all, it was destined to be a
turning point in her quiet existence. Her eleventh year, for instance,
had been a real turning-point, since it was then that she had left
Sunnybrook Farm and come to her maiden aunts in Riverboro. Aurelia
Randall may have been doubtful as to the effect upon her spinster
sisters of the irrepressible child, but she was hopeful from the first
that the larger opportunities of Riverboro would be the "making" of
Rebecca herself.

The next turning-point was her fourteenth year, when she left the
district school for the Wareham Female Seminary, then in the hey-day
of its local fame. Graduation (next to marriage, perhaps, the most
thrilling episode in the life of a little country girl) happened at
seventeen, and not long afterward her Aunt Miranda's death, sudden and
unexpected, changed not only all the outward activities and conditions
of her life, but played its own part in her development.

The brick house looked very homelike and pleasant on a June morning
nowadays wit