a friendly "Howdy?" when they met, conscious of perfect
equality. It was much better to be poor in a place like this than in a
great city,--to have at least physical abundance if one could not have
other advantages. Elvira Hill was not conscious of being poor, though
just now she was anxious to get a country school to teach. All her life
had been spent amid these familiar scenes, her condition in life was
neither worse nor better than that of her acquaintances, and it never
occurred to her to be discontented with her lot and rebel against fate.
She had been brought up on a farm, had known what it was to go after the
cows of an evening, to drive them to the barn-lot bars and milk them, to
catch a horse in the pasture and saddle and ride it, to hunt hens' nests
in the hay-mow, to churn, and wash dishes, and get vegetables from the
garden, and pick the raspberries and blackberries that ripened in the
fence corners along the fields and woods. But just now she was living
with her grandmother in a little brown house in the cluster of houses
called Hill's Station. There were two stores, a post-office, a
blacksmith's shop, and a mill; the mail-trains stopped here, and a daily
hack carried passengers northward two miles and a half to a larger
village, Sassafrasville, where there was an excellent academy. The
national pike ran through Hill's Station, and there was a great deal of
travel on this road,--local travel of various kinds, peddlers' wagons
which stopped in every town, and long rows of white-covered movers'
wagons going West to Illinois or Iowa or Kansas. What wonder, then, that
with all these advantages the people of Hill's Station thought
themselves centrally located, and watched with complaisant interest the
passing trains, the daily hack, and the teams going along the pike? That
they were pleasantly located there was no doubt. Tall beech- and
sugar-maple-trees, part of the original forest, stood singly here and
there and cast pleasant islands of shade upon the expanse of sunshine,
and from the fields which bordered the road came the scent of
clover-blooms.

Elvira Hill had gone to the little country schools, sometimes to the one
a mile west of town, sometimes to the one a mile east, and for the past
three years had attended the Sassafrasville Academy: so that now, at
seventeen, she was considered to have a good education, and expected to
follow the example of many of the young people of that section and go to
teachin