I was the Wallencamp school-teacher. I had come to "this rock-bound coast," imagining myself impelled by much the same necessity as that which fired the bosoms of the earlier pilgrims. Not that I had been restricted in respect to religious privileges, but I sought for a true independence of life and aim; and furthermore, it should be said, I had come to Wallencamp on a mission. "On a mission!" how the thought had tickled my fancy and roused my warmest enthusiasm but a few short days before! Indeed, I had not been yet a week in Wallencamp, and now, as I walked up the lane in a mood quite the reverse of enthusiastic, I was painfully trying to gather from my small and scattered sources of information what the exact meaning of the phrase might be. I had entered on the performance of my errand to Wallencamp under circumstances not usual, perhaps, among propagandists; nevertheless, I had been singularly free from misgivings. A girl of nineteen years, I had a home endowed with every luxury; a circle of family acquaintance, which, I admitted, did me great credit; congenial companions; while as for my education, I was pleased to call it completed. My career at boarding-schools had been of a delightfully varied and elective nature, for I had not deigned to toil with squalid studiousness, or even to sail with politic and inglorious ease through the prescribed course of study at any institution. Any misadventures necessarily following from this course my friends had gilded over with the flattering insinuation that I was "too vivacious" for this sort of discipline, or "too fragile" for that, though I am bound to say that, in such cases, my "vivacity" had generally sealed my fate before the delicacy of my constitution became too alarmingly apparent. I had, to be sure, a few commendable aspirations, but I had started out fresh so many times with them only to see them meet the same end! Though not by nature of a self-depreciatory turn of mind, I had occasional flashes of inspiration, to the effect that, in spite of the soft flattery of friends, I really was amounting to very little after all. It was in a mood induced by one of these supernatural gleams that I stood on one occasion, leaning a pair of very plump arms on the graveyard wall, looking wistfully over into the place of tombs, and thinking how nice it would be to have done forever with the fret and turmoil of life! And it was at such a time, too, that I received from a school friend, Mary Waite, the letter which was the moving cause of my mission to Wallencamp.