She watched them out of sight—a curious, kindly gossipy soul, whose interest in other people gave a color to her own life and harmed no one.
They found others like her, bringing hope and happiness to their own little corner of the world in a way that a whole army of professional socialogists could never do it. Stopping to ask for a drink at a cabin at the end of a mountain road one day, they found the woman bending over a flat, heavy box that had just come in on the stage. She glowed with excitement.
“It’s our travelling library,” she explained. “This is the third one we’ve had, and it’s the best yet.”
Oblivious to the strangers for a minute, she fingered the worn volumes caressingly.
“Here’s Carman’s ‘Making of Personality,’ I hoped they’d send that. And, Oh, Sonny,” she called to a tow-headed, blue-overalled boy hovering shyly and eagerly in the doorway, “here’s ‘Nicholas Nickleby.’ He has just finished ‘The Old Curiosity Shop’,” she remarked casually. “He should have all of Dickens read by the time he’s sixteen.”
“Where do you get them?” they inquired.
“The Institute gets them from the government. They are always left here because this is on the stage road. Some of the women have to come five miles for their books, but we try to help each other by leaving them half way whenever we can. We trade them around like our mothers used to exchange their home-made yeast.”
Finally she came to, apologetically. She made tea for her guests and talked to them about books. The living-room of her shining little house opened to the out-of-doors at the front, and at the back, with tiny bedrooms at the sides, but it was a centre of refinement, from the clean scrubbed floor to the pictures on the walls. These, too, she had acquired when the women ordered a collection from an art catalogue to decorate the school. They had cost a few cents each, and her husband had whittled out little wooden frames for them. A special place of honor above the book-shelves, was given to the famous “Hope.”
“I had seen that picture often enough, years ago,” she remarked, “but I never knew what it meant till we came up here and the frost killed our crops three years in succession, while we still had faith in good years to come. The one unbroken string and the one star in the sky were very familiar to us for a long time.... We like that picture very much.”
Another evening, coasting along a quiet road some miles from town, a section without a village