of things at Sunnybrook, where chapters of accidents had unfolded themselves in a sort of serial story that had run through the year. The potato crop had failed; there were no apples to speak of; the hay had been poor; Aurelia had turns of dizziness in her head; Mark had broken his ankle. As this was his fourth offense, Miranda inquired how many bones there were in the human body, “so ‘t they’d know when Mark got through breakin’ ‘em.” The time for paying the interest on the mortgage, that incubus that had crushed all the joy out of the Randall household, had come and gone, and there was no possibility, for the first time in fourteen years, of paying the required forty-eight dollars. The only bright spot in the horizon was Hannah’s engagement to Will Melville,—a young farmer whose land joined Sunnybrook, who had a good house, was alone in the world, and his own master. Hannah was so satisfied with her own unexpectedly radiant prospects that she hardly realized her mother’s anxieties; for there are natures which flourish, in adversity, and deteriorate when exposed to sudden prosperity. She had made a visit of a week at the brick house; and Miranda’s impression, conveyed in privacy to Jane, was that Hannah was close as the bark of a tree, and consid’able selfish too; that when she’d clim’ as fur as she could in the world, she’d kick the ladder out from under her, everlastin’ quick; that, on being sounded as to her ability to be of use to the younger children in the future, she said she guessed she’d done her share a’ready, and she wan’t goin’ to burden Will with her poor relations. “She’s Susan Randall through and through!” ejaculated Miranda. “I was glad to see her face turned towards Temperance. If that mortgage is ever cleared from the farm, ‘t won’t be Hannah that’ll do it; it’ll be Rebecca or me!”
Chapter XXIV.
Aladdin Rubs His Lamp
“Your esteemed contribution entitled Wareham Wildflowers has been accepted for The Pilot, Miss Perkins,” said Rebecca, entering the room where Emma Jane was darning the firm’s stockings. “I stayed to tea with Miss Maxwell, but came home early to tell you.”
“You are joking, Becky!” faltered Emma Jane, looking up from her work.
“Not a bit; the senior editor read it and thought it highly instructive; it appears in the next issue.”
“Not in the same number with your poem about the golden gates that close behind us when we leave school?”—and Emma Jane held her breath as she awaited the reply.
“Even so, Miss Perkins.”
“Rebecca,” said Emma Jane, with the nearest approach to tragedy that her nature would permit, “I don’t know as I shall be able to bear it, and if anything happens to me, I ask you solemnly to bury that number of The Pilot with me.”
Rebecca did not seem to think this the expression of an exaggerated state of feeling, inasmuch as she replied, “I know; that’s just the way it seemed to me at first, and even now, whenever I’m alone and take out the Pilot back numbers to read over my contributions, I almost burst with pleasure; and it’s not that they are good either, for they look worse to me every time I read them.”
“If you would only live with me in some little house when we get older,” mused Emma Jane, as with her darning needle poised in air she regarded the opposite wall dreamily, “I would do the housework and cooking, and copy all your poems and stories, and take them to the post-office, and you needn’t do anything but write. It would be perfectly elergant!”
“I’d like nothing better, if I hadn’t promised to keep house for John,” replied Rebecca.
“He won’t have a house for a good many years, will he?”
“No,” sighed Rebecca ruefully, flinging herself down by the table and resting her head on her hand. “Not unless we can contrive to pay off that detestable mortgage. The day grows farther off instead of nearer now that we haven’t paid the interest this year.”
She pulled a piece of paper towards her, and scribbling idly on it read aloud in a moment or two:—
“Will you pay a little faster?” said the mortgage to the farm;
“I confess I’m very tired of this place.”
“The weariness is mutual,” Rebecca Randall cried;
“I would I’d never gazed upon your face!”
“A note has a ‘face,’” observed Emma Jane, who was gifted in arithmetic. “I didn’t know that a mortgage had.”
“Our mortgage has,” said Rebecca revengefully. “I should know him if I met him in the dark. Wait and I’ll draw him for you. It will be good for you to know how he looks, and then when you have a husband and seven children, you won’t allow him to come anywhere within a mile of your farm.”
The sketch when completed was of a sort to be shunned by a timid person on the verge of slumber. There was a tiny house on the right, and a weeping family gathered in front of it. The mortgage was depicted as a cross between a fiend and an ogre, and held an axe uplifted in his red right hand. A figure with streaming black locks was staying the blow, and this, Rebecca explained complacently, was intended as a likeness of herself, though she was rather vague as to the method she should use in attaining her end.
“He’s terrible,” said Emma Jane, “but awfully wizened and small.”
“It’s only a twelve hundred dollar mortgage,” said Rebecca, “and that’s called a small one. John saw a man once that was mortgaged for twelve thousand.”
“Shall you be a writer or an editor?” asked Emma Jane presently, as if one had only to choose and the thing were done.
“I shall have to do what turns up first, I suppose.”
“Why not go out as a missionary to Syria, as the Burches are always coaxing you to? The Board would pay your expenses.”
“I can’t make up my mind to be a missionary,” Rebecca answered. “I’m not good enough in the first place, and I don’t ‘feel a call,’ as Mr. Burch says you must. I would like to do something for somebody and make things move, somewhere, but I don’t want to go thousands of miles away teaching people how to live when I haven’t learned myself. It isn’t as if the heathen really needed me; I’m sure they’ll come out all right in the end.”
“I can’t see how; if all the people who ought to go out to save them stay at home as we do,” argued Emma Jane.
“Why, whatever God is, and wherever He is, He must always be there, ready and waiting. He can’t move about and miss people. It may take the heathen a little longer to find Him, but God will make allowances, of course. He knows if they live in such hot climates it must make them lazy and slow; and the parrots and tigers and snakes and bread-fruit trees distract their minds; and having no books, they can’t think as well; but they’ll find God somehow, some time.”
“What if they die first?” asked Emma Jane.
“Oh, well, they can’t be blamed for that; they don’t die on purpose,” said Rebecca, with a comfortable theology.
In these days Adam Ladd sometimes went to Temperance on business connected with the proposed branch of the railroad familiarly known as the “York
