A few moments later the little party broke up and Lyman went off alone. A storm raged within him--"A hired girl to speak to me like that--a common hired girl! I’ll teach her her place when I marry Amanda. And Amanda was high and mighty to-day. Thought she owned the world because she graduated from Millersville! As though that’s anything! She’s the kind needs a strong hand, a master hand. And I’ll be the master! I like her kind, the women who have spirit and fire. But she needs to be held under, subjected by a stronger spirit. That little runt of a Martin Landis was hanging round her, too. He has no show when I’m in the running. He’s poor and has no education. He’s just a clodhopper.”
Meanwhile the clodhopper had also said good-bye to Amanda. For some reason he did not stop to analyze, the heart of Martin Landis was light as he went home from the Commencement at Millersville. He had always detested Lyman Mertzheimer, for he had felt too often the snubs and taunts of the rich boy. Amanda’s rebuff of the arrogant youth pleased Martin.
“I like Amanda,” he thought frankly, but he never went beyond that in the analysis of his feelings for the comrade of his childhood and young boyhood. “I like her and I’d hate to see her waste her time on a fellow like Lyman Mertzheimer. I’m glad she squelched him. Perhaps some day he’ll find there are still some desirable things that money can’t buy.”
CHAPTER VII
Amanada Reist, Teacher
Amanda had no desire to teach far from her home. “I want to see the whole United States if I live long enough,” she declared, “but I want to travel through the distant parts of it, not settle there to live. While I have a home I want to stay near it. So I wish I could get a school in Lancaster County.”
Her wish was granted. There was an opening in Crow Hill, in the little rural school in which she had received the rudiments of her education. Amanda applied for the position and was elected.
She brought to that little school several innovations. Her love and knowledge of nature helped her to make the common studies less monotonous and more interesting. A Saturday afternoon nutting party with her pupils afforded a more promising subject for Monday’s original composition than the hackneyed suggestions of the grammar book’s “Tell all you know about the cultivation of coffee.” Later, snow forts in the school-yard impressed the children with the story of Ticonderoga more indelibly than mere reading about it could have done. During her last year at Normal, Amanda had read about a school where geography was taught by the construction of miniature islands, capes, straits, peninsulas, and so forth, in the school-yard. She directed the older children in the formation of such a landscape picture. When a blundering boy slipped and with one bare foot demolished at one stroke the cape, island and bay, there was much merriment and rivalry for the honor of rebuilding. The children were almost unanimous in their affection for the new teacher and approval of her methods of teaching. Most of them ran home with eager tales concerning the wonderful, funny, “nice” ways Miss Reist had of teaching school.
However, Crow Hill is no Eden. Some of the older boys laughed at the “silly ideas” of “that Manda Reist” and disliked the way she taught geography and made the pupils “play in the dirt and build capes and islands and the whole blamed geography business right in the school-yard.”