Perhaps it was a little bit of diplomacy on Mrs. Abbott’s part that provided an occupation out of the house for Miss Stubbs, while she talked of her very seriously to some of the scholars. Lily, who was as quick to act upon her good impulses as upon any others, had told her teacher frankly what had occurred. Mrs. Abbott received her confession sorrowfully, but made no comment at the time, simply asking the girl to call to her room those who had been present at the conversation.

Delia, Katie, Fannie Holmes, Bell Burgoyne, and Lily Dart, the Friendly Five, as they called themselves, took their seats rather shamefacedly, and waited to hear what Mrs. Abbott had to say.

If it had been any one but Mrs. Abbott the girls would have thought her afraid to begin. She certainly seemed much less composed than usual. She looked out of the window thoughtfully, rose and walked half a dozen times across the room, then took her seat again, looked keenly at the girls for a moment, and said:

“I hardly know whether or not to tell you something that will explain the presence in our school of a girl who is very different—I do not pretend to say she is not—from all who have ever been here. I hope I may help her by telling you, but sometimes I am afraid I shall do more harm than good by being frank.”

Here she hesitated, and the girls, who were wildly curious, were afraid she had arrived at the conclusion not to tell them any thing. She noticed their inquiring looks and smiled.

“I have made your lively imaginations expect more of a story than I really have to tell,” she said. “Last July, as you already know, I took Ethel and Candace for a six weeks’ stay in the Catskills. The hotel was on one mountain and faced another. In the deep valley between were several little houses, not clustered together for neighborly companionship, as you might suppose they would be in such a place, but each standing quite alone in what they call a ‘burnt-off’ clearing. The mountain air, while it strengthened me, made me wakeful, and, delightfully still as the place was, I could never sleep after the first ray of daylight broke through the sky. There were such glorious cloud effects that I thought I might as well turn my early wakefulness to good account; so the dawn of day always found me in shawls and wrapper sitting at the window of my bedroom.

“The clouds hang very near the earth among those heights; so in watching them I did not have to lift my eyes too high to see what was going on about me, although there was not much to see, except an occasional ox-team or a man on his way somewhere. But I began to notice after a while that one of the earliest living things astir after the birds was a little girl who brought a big pail up the hill, went around to the back door of the hotel, and presently came back with the pail filled with water, carrying it down the precipitous path quickly but with great care not to spill all its contents, as certainly any one not used to perpendicular paths would have done.

“To have made the journey thus loaded would have been a task for most people, but this little water-bearer came again and again. I have known her to carry down her load eleven times before the first bell rang to warn the hotel guests that it was time to leave their beds and prepare for breakfast.

“I am not fond of exercise before breakfast, but I grew so interested in the little water-carrier that one morning I dressed myself very early and went out, meeting her, as I expected, swinging her empty pail and repeating something to herself as if she were learning a lesson. She was larger when I stood on her level than when I saw her from the window, and sufficiently strong not to have minded carrying two or three pails of water—but eleven!

“‘It is hard work for you,’ I said, sympathetically, after wishing her good-morning. ‘O, my, no,’ she said, brightly; ‘jest suppose I had the empty pails to carry down and the full ones to fetch up!’

“I admired her happy philosophy and asked which of the houses she carried her pails of water to, and was surprised enough when she told me it was to all of them. I learned later that the well at the hotel was the only one in the vicinity, and, the supply of rain-water being inadequate, the people in the four little homes I could catch glimpses of through the trees were willing to give a cent for each pail of water brought to them!

“At mountain hotels fruit on the breakfast-table is not usual; so the boarders were very glad to engage wild raspberries from the same girl, who gathered them, with the help of three little brothers, after she had finished her water-carrying.

“I used to walk on the piazza with Ethel every morning while Candace was eating her breakfast, and sometimes still longer, when the grass seemed too damp for more distant rambling, and as we turned the corner and walked down the end of the dining-room we could see through the windows of the kitchen beyond it great baskets of dirty dishes carried in and emptied upon a table and piled up ready for washing. At a sink close by a fat woman was perpetually washing dishes, which she handed as fast as rinsed to two girls who wiped and piled them upon another table. The dish-washing and wiping always seemed very attractive to Ethel, and she made every excuse to stay longest on that part of the piazza. At last from frequent observation of the process and the workers I began to discover that my little water-carrier was one of the dish-wipers.

“I made arrangements when we first went to the hotel for hiring a strong wagon and a very steady old horse, and Ethel and I went every fair day for a long, lovely drive among the beautiful mountains. One day our trustworthy horse was attacked with a kind of rheumatic lameness which his owner admitted he was liable to have occasionally, but which would not last long. We waited patiently through several rainy and cloudy days, but when one came that seemed more perfect than any other day could be I felt as if I could wait no longer, and consulted the landlord about hiring another horse. I think, to exonerate that very cautious and conservative man, I must confess that I was a little self-willed, and engaged a coltish creature that he absolutely condemned. But I have driven nearly every day for so many years that I had perhaps too great an estimate of my own powers.

“We started on our drive, picking out the least precipitous roads, where all nearly approached the perpendicular for at least some portion of their way, and so far from seeming coltish our slow-moving horse might have been a grandfather.”

There was a prevailing opinion at Coventry school that Mrs. Abbott was rather fond of telling a story, and knew how to tell it well. Perhaps it was the strong interest she herself felt in every thing she said to her girls, or perhaps it was the great love they felt for her that made them now listen so intently that if the celebrated pin that is always mentioned in connection with attentive audiences had dropped it might have made quite a clatter, and yet certainly there was nothing very exciting about what she had said so far, as Kate Ashley found when she tried to put it into her inevitable diary.

“Elfie was in high spirits,” pursued Mrs. Abbott, “and laughed and sang as we drove along the shady roads, that were almost cold, the shade was so dense.

“We were within a mile or two of home when we came to a little log hut we had often seen before, but could rarely pass without stopping, because we knew it was the place to buy the most delicious maple-sugar that could be found in that region. The lame old woman sitting in the door rose up and came to the carriage, helping out Elfie, who had twelve cents, the price of a pound cake of sugar, clutched in her hand.

“I shall always be devoutly thankful that the child did get out, for before she had even stepped into the house behind the old woman a man whom I had not seen fired his gun at a squirrel close behind us, and in an instant the startled horse dashed away with me, paying no heed to all my efforts to hold him in. The road was up-hill for a little way, but I well remembered that there was a long, steep pitch after that, and I drew the reins with all the strength I had and settled myself into the middle of the seat so I should not be quite so easily thrown out. When we reached the top of the hill the downward pace was terrible. He seemed not to run, but to take great plunging leaps. His very first jump pulled the reins out of my hands, and I crouched down on the floor, grasping the seat and expecting every instant to be thrown out. I suppose I did not spend much time in this way, but it seemed like an hour that I clung there with a dreadful death apparently quite certain, for the road was narrow, with a steep, stony descent on one side. At the bottom of the terrible hill there was a short bit of road as nearly level as any road ever is among those mountains, then a fork, one road taking straight up another hill, the other making a sharp, sudden turn toward a plank bridge that had been injured by late storms and was considered impassable.

“If the horse, whose bounds seemed to be getting a little less impetuous, went straight up the other hill, possibly, hope whispered to me, I might be saved; but if he took that awful turn—I turned sick when I thought of what would come then!

“In those few terrible seconds before we reached the foot of the hill I saw—although I was not conscious till afterward that I saw any thing—the hotel standing boldly out upon its clearing, with people walking and sitting upon its broad piazza, and, just before the bit of level road I was approaching, a little black house, with a group of children playing beneath a tree and a girl hanging a heavy quilt upon a clothes-line. The noise of the wheels made her turn her head. I cannot remember what she did then, but I have been told that she made a dash for the road, and, when my horse came to the spot where to turn was death, she stood at the point of danger, right in the middle of the road, with the dark, wet calico quilt held up in her extended arms. If she had moved it it would have added to the horse’s terror and driven him into a mad bolt at the precipice on the other side of the road, but held as the girl held it it simply made, as she hoped it would, a barrier to keep him from taking the turn.

“My horse’s pace grew less fearful then, even on the level space, and before we reached the top of the steep ascent it had moderated so greatly that two men at the top in a loaded wagon sprang from their seat at sight of my danger and stopped him without much difficulty.”

Mrs. Abbott stopped for a moment, overcome by the recollection of her exciting adventure, while the girls, who had almost forgotten to breathe while they listened, crowded about her with caresses and murmurs of thankfulness that she had been saved.