As she talked, the woman led the way through a door, and the girl, advancing, uttered an exclamation of delight, for she found herself on a porch so open that she was hardly conscious that there were walls. “Oh,” she thought, “blessings on the head of my predecessor, outlandish though she may have seemed to mine hostess!”
Mrs. Twiggly was eyeing her curiously. “You like it?” she inquired, rather hoping that she would not. She decided that all teaching folk were hopeless, when Josephine Bayley turned around with eyes that glowed, and, clasping her hands, exclaimed, “I never had such a perfectly wonderful place to sleep in all my whole life!”
Mrs. Twiggly’s sniff was not audible. “What poor folks she must come from!” she was thinking. Aloud she remarked: “Miss Bayley, I’ll fetch over your breakfast to-morrow, bein’ as it’s your first mornin’, and if you’re scared, fire off the gun twice, but mind you aim it in the air. Well, good-night.”
“Good-night, and thank you for your kindness.” Then Josephine Bayley was left alone with the stars and the silence, but somehow her desire to laugh was gone. She felt awed by the bigness and stillness of things, and standing in the darkness in her out-of-doors bedroom, she reached her arms toward the star-crowned peaks and prayed, “God of the mountains, give me here some work to do for You.”
CHAPTER THREE
NEIGHBORHOOD GOSSIP
Josephine Bayley awakened, as all do in entirely new surroundings, with the question, “Why, where am I?” Then, upon hearing a chattering of animal life without, she sat up in bed and saw a fir tree festooned with webs that sparkled with quivering dewdrops, saw two bushy-tailed squirrels gathering cones, and heard a meadow-lark singing its joyous morning-song. The new teacher arose, surprised to find that all that night she had not awakened. She glanced in the corner where stood the sentinel gun. She was sure that she should never have need of its services.
Just as she was dressed she heard a rapping on her outer door. Skipping, with a heart as light as her feet, she opened it, and beheld Mrs. Enterprise Twiggly standing there with a tray. She looked exactly as she had the night before, only more so, in the full light of all-revealing day.
“Good-mornin’, Miss Bayley,” the woman remarked, as she entered the sun-flooded living-room of the log cabin and placed the tray on the rustic center-table.
“I didn’t hear any firin’ in the night, so I take it you slept through.”
“I did, indeed,” was the enthusiastic reply. “No longer shall I need a pine pillow to woo slumber. I don’t know when I have awakened so refreshed.”