Mrs. Brooks fulfilled her promise, and so faithfully did she work in the good cause, that a dozen little pupils were engaged for Miss Milly’s school before preparations were fairly made to open it. These did not take long, however, as Miss Felix, the teacher, who was going away, sent to Mrs. Harrow’s house two long forms of desks and benches, with her compliments and best wishes to Milly for her future success.

Milly fairly began to dance around the room, in the new joy of her heart, on receiving this, to her, valuable present. “Everybody,” she said, “must not be so kind to us, or I shall have a sickness brought on by too much happiness.”

Poor Milly! she had so long had a “sorrow-sickness,” that the present good fortune was almost too much to endure.

For a week she went about cleaning, and sweeping, and dusting, and making ready generally, for the great event, the opening of her school. Singing as gayly as a lark, she moved furniture up-stairs and down, and debated over and over again upon the best arrangement for effect. The front room was to be especially devoted to the use of her class. The carpet was removed, and thoughtful Miss Felix’s desks and benches placed in it, along the walls. Mrs. Brooks sent an old white muslin dress to be made into window-curtains, and Martin spent a whole day in forming a little platform out of boards, on which, when covered with green baize, the teacher’s table and chair were to rest.

Even Elinor’s sick-chamber assumed a different aspect. One day, when Mr. Brooks was in the village on business, he stepped into a paper-hanger’s, and chose a cheap, but pretty paper for the lime-washed wall. It was very cheerful-looking, being formed of alternate stripes of white and rose-color; “for,” said the farmer, when he reached home, “I warrant Miss Elinor grows tired of seeing the same cracks in the plaster, year in and year out. She must have something new and gay, like this, that will help to keep her spirits up!”

Mrs. Harrow and the farmer’s wife pasted this paper on the walls themselves, with a little assistance from Nelly, who stood ready to lift benches, hand the scissors back and forth, and give any other slight aid of which she was capable.

The house was only one-story high, with a garret, so Elinor’s room had a slanting roof and a dormer window. Mrs. Brooks said it would be a great improvement, if the striped paper were pasted on the ceiling too, and joined in the peak with a wood-colored border resembling a heavy cord or rope. This made the place look, when it was done, like a pink canvas tent. The change was wonderful. An imitation of a pair of tassels of the same color and style as the rope border, which the paper-hanger, hearing of the design, sent to the house as a present to Miss Elinor, when pasted carefully at each end of the peak, against the wall, made the illusion perfect.

Elinor said she lived in the Tent of Kindness.

The neighbors who came in to inspect all these preparations, said Elinor’s was the very prettiest dormer-room they had ever seen. There was enough left of the old dress to curtain the single window, which being done, everything was at last pronounced to be in a state of readiness.

And now we must go back to Nelly, who, I suppose, some of my readers remember, is the adopted daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Brooks. Nelly had known much sorrow in her short life, as will be seen on reference to the little story called “Nelly and her Friends.” She had never experienced what it was to be loved by father and mother till now; and when the farmer and his wife began to teach her to call them by those sacred titles, she felt herself a very happy little girl. She was delighted at the prospect of attending school. She had never been to one, and, therefore, perhaps, the novelty of the thing was half the attraction.

When the important day arrived, and the child found herself seated in the class-room with twelve or fourteen other little folks, she was filled with awe and dismay, so much so, that she scarcely dared turn around to take a good look at her next neighbor, a girl of twelve, in the shy dread that she might be caught in the act, which circumstance would, doubtless, have occasioned her much confusion.

Miss Harrow did not give her pupils any lessons to learn this first morning. She said, as no one had books, it should be a day of pleasure and not of work, and on the morrow they would begin to study in earnest.

So, during the whole morning, the children drew funny little pictures on slips of paper, which were handed them for the purpose of amusing them; and in the afternoon, the teacher made them pull their benches close to the fire, in cosy rows, while she told them stories.

As, with the deepest interest, Nelly gravely listened, she came to the conclusion that this was just the best school of which she had ever heard, everything was so pleasant.

There was a little dark-haired boy in a blue jacket, who sat near, and who whittled her pencil, oh so sharp, every time she blunted it! She told Comfort, in confidence, when she went home, that this little boy’s pictures were quite as good as any Martin could make. He drew ships under full sail, oh, beautiful! and as for those men, squaring off to fight, up in the corner of the paper, they made you think at once of Uz and Buz the two roosters, that quarrelled every morning in the barnyard, about which should have the most corn.

In a week or two, however, Nelly’s rapture abated somewhat; and one day she came home with her books in her hands, and threw herself on one of the chairs in the kitchen, crying heartily.

“Heyday,” cried Comfort, looking up from the fire, over which she was broiling a fish. “Heyday, what ar’s the matter now?”

“O Comfort,” cried Nelly, “she struck me, she struck me, before them all!”

“What!” cried Comfort, standing erect with surprise. “Miss Nelly’s been for whippin’ a’ready? Why, Nelly, shame, shame! Dis yer conduct is oncommon bad of yer.”

"It wasn’t Miss Harrow, at all," said Nelly, reddening; “it was that horrid, old thing, Melindy.”

“Oh, Melindy,” echoed Comfort, in a tone of relief.

“Yes,” continued Nelly, “she tries to get me to laugh in school, every day. She makes eyes at me, big, round ones, so, Comfort.”

Comfort chuckled.

“I don’t wonder yer laugh, if she does that way, chile.”

"But that isn’t all," added Nelly indignantly. “She chews paper-balls, and sends them over the room, right at the tip of my nose. Sometimes they stick there a second or so, till I can put up my hand; and then the scholars giggle-like. Oh, you’ve no idea, Comfort, what an awful girl Melindy is. She punches me, too.”

“Punches, Nelly?”

“Yes, and to-day, when school was out, she gave me such a whack,—right in my ribs; shall I show you how, Comfort?”

“No, thank yer,” answered the old woman, laughing. She had a cause for being good-humored that day. “But why whack such a little critter as you be, Nell?”

“Oh,” said Nelly, hesitating, “she knows.”

Something in her manner made Comfort suspicious. She sat down and called Nelly to her. Taking hold of both her hands, she looked her full in the eyes.

“Speak the truff,” she said; “didn’t yer whack Melindy fust?”

“Yes,” said Nell, with a curious mixture of honesty and triumph, “I did, Comfort; I gave her a good one, I tell you! I didn’t stop to think about what I was doin’ till I felt her whackin’ o’ me back again.”

“Then she sarved yer right,” said the old colored woman, going back to her fish, “and I hope she’ll treat yer so every time yer begin the aggrawation.”

"But she snowballed me first, and called out that I was nobody’s child, and was taken out of the streets, and such like. I couldn’t stand that, anyhow. I had to whack her, Comfort."

“No you hadn’t,” said Comfort, sternly, and at the same time gesticulating earnestly with the fish-fork. “It wasn’t your part to do any punishin’, whatsomever. Leastways, no punishment but one.”

"And what’s that?" demanded Nelly, making large A’s and O’s in the steam that had settled on the windows. Here Martin suddenly put down a big newspaper he had been reading in a corner, and which had hidden him entirely from view. “Have you so soon forgotten your old rule of good for evil, Nell?” he asked. “Don’t you know that is what Comfort means?”

Comfort nodded at him approvingly.

“But Melindy is ugly, powerful ugly, Martin,” said Nell, coloring, “and anyway she will knock all us little girls. It’s born in her. I think she must have been meant for an Indian, that pulls the hair off your head, like mother told us about. Doing good to Melindy is just of no account at all.”

“Did you ever try it?” asked Martin.

“Well, no-o. You see I could tell it was of no use. And Miss Harrow, she stands Melindy on a chair with a paper cap on her head, every day, at dinner-time.”

“Poor girl,” said Martin, “I am sorry for her.”

"I’m not," said Nell, promptly, “it keeps her from mischief, you know.”

Martin was silent.

Comfort began to sing a tune over her fish, interrupting herself at times with a low, quaint laugh, as though particularly well pleased with some thought.

“What’s the matter, Comfort?” asked Nelly.

“Oh, nuthin’,” was the answer; “I guess I’m not very miserable to-day, that’s all;” and off she went in a chuckle again.

“Nelly,” said Martin, after another grave pause, “you used to be a better girl than you are now. Last summer, about the time Marm Lizy died, you tried ever so hard to be good, and you improved very much indeed.”

“I know it,” said Nell, a little sadly, “and I would be good now, if it wasn’t for Melindy Porter. Ever since I’ve been to school I’ve felt hard and wicked. She torments and worries me so, that I think sometimes there’s no use in tryin’ to be good at all. I do and say wrong things, just when I don’t mean to, all along o’ Melindy.”

"If you and Melindy were friends, you wouldn’t feel so, would you?"

“I s’pose not, but who wants to be friends with anybody like that?” was the ready retort.

"Still, you would rather be friends than enemies, Nell, wouldn’t you? You would prefer that this little girl"—

“Big one, ever so big,” interrupted Nelly, quickly.

“You would prefer that this big girl, then, should bear you no malice, even if you didn’t like her, and she didn’t like you. Isn’t it so?”

"Well, yes. I would like to have her stop pinchin’ and pullin’ the hairs of all o’ us little ones. That’s what I’d like, Martin."

“That’s easy done, Nelly,” said Martin in a confident tone.

“Easy, Martin? How easy?”

“Be kind to her. Show her that you bear her no ill feeling.”

“But I do bear her ill feeling, Martin! What’s the good of fibbing about it to her? I can’t go to her and say, ‘Melindy, I like you ever so much,’ when all the time I despise her like poison, can I? I am sure that wouldn’t be right.”

“No,” broke in Comfort, “that ar wouldn’t be right, Martin, for sartain.”

Martin looked a little puzzled. “But, Comfort,” he said at length, “I don’t want her to speak pleasantly to Melindy till she feels pleasantly. That’s the thing. I wouldn’t have Nell act an untruth, a bit more than I’d have her tell one. But I do want her to try to feel like givin’ Melindy a little good for her evil.”

Martin said this with such a pleading, earnest look, smiling coaxingly on Nelly as he spoke, that, for the moment, the heart of the little girl was softened.

“Well, Martin,” she said, “you are always preachin’ ar’n’t you? But it’s nice preachin’ and I don’t hate it a bit. Some day, when I get real, awful good, you’ll leave off, won’t you? I’ll think about Melindy, and may-be I can screw my courage up to not mind bein’ cracked at by her.”

“Pray for them that uses yer spitefully,” said Comfort with solemnity.

Nelly seemed struck by this.

“What, pray for Melindy?” she asked meditatingly.

“Chil’en,” said the old woman, “don’t never forget that ar mighty sayin’. Yer may be kind and such like to yer enemys, but if yer don’t take time to pray for his poor ole soul’s salvation, you might as well not do nuthin’. That’s the truff, the Gospil truff.”

“Well,” said Nell with a deep sigh, “I’ll pray for Melindy then, and for that bad, little Johnny Williams, too, to-night when I go to bed; but I shall have, oh, Comfort, such hard work to mean it, here!” and her hands were pressed for an instant over her breast.

The next morning, just as Nelly was starting for school, Martin drew her, mysteriously, aside.

“Which hand will you have, Nell?” he asked, holding both behind him.

“This one,” she said, eagerly, touching the right hand, in which she had caught a side glimpse of something glittering like burnished gold.

Martin smilingly extended towards her a small, oval box, covered with a beautiful golden paper.

“How very, very lovely,” cried Nell, opening it.

“It is yours,” said Martin, “but only yours to give away. I want you to do something with it.”

"Can’t I keep it? Who must I give it to?"

“Melindy!”

"Oh, Martin, I can’t, I just can’t,—there!" “Then you don’t wish to make her good, Nell! You want her to be cruel and wicked and hard as long as she lives!”

"Oh no, no, I don’t wish that now. I prayed for her last night." The last sentence was added in a very low tone.

“You refuse then?”

She looked at him, sighed, and turned away.

Martin put his box in his pocket, and walked off in the direction of the barn.

At dinner-time, Nelly came home quite radiant. Lessons had gone smoothly. Miss Harrow had praised her for industry at her books, “and, would you believe it, Martin,” she added in an accent of high satisfaction, “Melinda didn’t make but two faces at me all the whole morning! Wasn’t that nice? They were pretty bad ones, though,—bad enough to last! She screwed her nose all up, this way! Well, if you’ll give me the box now, I’ll take it to her this afternoon. I don’t feel hard against Melindy at all, now.”

Martin brought it to her after dinner, with great alacrity; and Nell walked very slowly to school with it in her hands, opening and shutting the lid a dozen times along the road, and eyeing it in an admiring, fascinated way, as though she would have no objection in the world to retain possession of it herself.

It was a hard effort to offer it to Melinda. So pretty a box she had never seen before.

“I mean to ask Martin,” she thought, “if he cannot find me another just like it.”

Near the door of Mrs. Harrow’s little house, Nelly encountered her tormentor, quite unexpectedly. She was standing outside, talking in a loud, boisterous way to two or three of the other children. Melinda was a tall, rather good-looking girl, of about fourteen years of age. She was attired in a great deal of gaudy finery, but was far from being neat or clean in appearance. At the present time, a large, freshly-torn hole in her dress, showed that in the interval between schools, she had been exercising her warlike propensities, and had come off, whether victor or not, a little the worse for wear. Her quilted red silk hood was now cocked fiercely over her eyes, in a very prophetic way. Nelly knew from that, as soon as she saw her, that she was in a bad frame of mind. Not daring to speak to her then, Nelly was quietly proceeding towards the door of the school, when with one or two tremendous strides, Melinda met her face to face.

“How did you like the big thumping I gave you yesterday?” she asked, with a grim smile.

Nelly walked on very fast, trying to keep from saying anything at all, in the fear that her indignation might express itself too plainly.

“Why don’t you speak up?” cried Melinda.

Still Nelly went on in silence. Melinda walked mockingly side by side with her, burlesquing her walk and serious face. At last, irritated beyond control, Melinda put out suddenly one of her feet, and deliberately tripped up her little schoolmate, who, before she could even cry out, found herself lying flat on her nose, on the snow.

The attack was made so abruptly, that Nelly had no time to see what was coming. Confused, stunned, angry, and hurt, she raised herself slowly to her knees and looked around her. There was at first, a dull, bruised feeling, about her head, but this passed away. Something in the deadly whiteness of her face made Melinda look a little alarmed, as she stood leaning against the wall, ready to continue the battle, if occasion required any efforts of the kind; but knowing well, in the depths of her cowardly heart, that, as the largest and strongest child at school, her victims could not, personally, revenge themselves upon her, to any very great extent. Looking her companion in the eyes, like a hunter keeping a wild animal at bay, Nelly staggered to her feet. She had meant to be so good that day! And this was the encouragement she received! Truly, the influence of Melinda on Nelly’s character was most pernicious. All the evil in her nature seemed aroused by the association. Tears, not resulting from physical pain, but from the great effort she still made to control her temper, rose to her eyes, as she saw a sneering smile on Melinda’s countenance. Till now she had striven to bear Martin’s advice in mind; but as this sneering smile broke into an ill-natured laugh, Nelly’s self-control gave way. Her face burned. She tossed the little golden gift, with disdainful roughness, at her persecutor’s feet, and said, in a gruff, and by no means conciliating voice,—

“There’s a box for you, Melindy. And Martin says I mustn’t hate you any more. But I do, worse than ever! There!”

Melinda gave a contemptuous snort. She walked up to the little gilt box, set her coarse, pegged shoe upon it, and quietly ground it to pieces. Then, without another word, she pushed open the school-room door, entered, and banged it to again, in poor Nelly’s red and angry face. The child leaned against the house and cried quietly, but almost despairingly.

“I wanted to be good,” she sobbed; “I wanted to be good so much, but she will not let me!”