Madeline was a favorite with all, especially with Mr. Green, and as the school would be small that summer, the plan struck him favorably. Her age, however, was an objection, and he must take time to see what others thought of a child like her becoming a schoolmistress. Others thought well of it, and so before the close of the next day it was generally known through Honedale, as the southern part of Devonshire was called, that pretty little Madge Clyde had been engaged as teacher, she receiving three dollars a week, with the understanding that she must board herself. It did not take Madeline long to calculate that twelve times three were thirty-six, more than a tenth of what her grandfather must borrow. It seemed like a little fortune, and blithe as a singing bird she flitted about the house, now stopping a moment to fondle her pet kitten, while she whispered the good news in its very appreciative ear, and then stroking her grandfather’s silvery hair, as she said: “You can tell them that you are sure of paying thirty-six dollars in the fall, and if I do well, maybe they’ll hire me longer. I mean to try my very best. I wonder if ever anybody before me taught a school when they were only fourteen and a half. Do I look as young as that?” and for an instant the bright; childish face scanned itself eagerly in the old-fashioned mirror, with the figure of an eagle on the top. She did look very young, and yet there was something womanly, too, in the expression of the face, something which said that life’s realities were already beginning to be understood by her. “If my hair were not short I should do better. What a pity I cut it the last time; it would have been so long and splendid now,” she continued, giving a kind of contemptuous pull at the thick, beautiful brown hair on whose glossy surface there was in certain lights a reddish tinge, which added to its beauty. “Never mind the hair, Maddy,” the old man said, gazing fondly at her with a half sigh as he remembered another brown head, pillowed now beneath the graveyard turf. “Maybe you won’t pass muster, and then the hair will make no difference. There’s a new committee-man, that Dr. Holbrook, from Boston, and new ones are apt to be mighty strict.”