As the morning went on, she tried to make some plan for escape. No longer was it safe in this vicinity. She must get away and hide from him. Where? Could she ever hope to evade a man who spent his entire time travelling over the earth? He had the assurance of the devil himself, and it was almost hopeless to try to get beyond his grasp. Nevertheless, she must go. The reading class which recited just before the noon-hour stumbled on its way for once without correction, while Dawn planned her next pitiful move. At noon she sent one of the older girls to Mrs. Peabody’s, to get her bag and a few little things that were lying about the room. She usually kept everything neatly packed in a large bag she had made—everything except her silk dress, which was hung on a nail. This the girl promised to fold nicely and put into the bag. She was to tell Mrs. Peabody that Dawn had decided to go a day before the time was up, and to thank the lady for all her kindness, and say Dawn was sorry she could not very well leave to explain it herself. The girl felt honored by the commission, and performed it to the letter, wishing the while that she knew where Teacher was going a day ahead of time, and resolving to ask her mother to invite the teacher to come to their house ahead of time, too. Rags took up his station on the school-house steps again for the afternoon session, having been abundantly fed from the generous dinner-pails, on apple-pie, doughnuts, and chicken bones. Rags felt it in the air that something was going to happen, but nothing did, and four o’clock came at last. Dawn had made the scholars write in their copy-books during the last hour of the afternoon. "Command you may your mind from play," straggled up and down a whole page in many of the books, while blots grew thick among the words, but no teacher wandered alertly up and down the aisles to watch and to correct; sometimes—oh, blessed honor!—to sit down and hold the quill pen, or, better still, take the dirty little fist of the writer into her own pink hand and guide the writing. The teacher sat behind a raised desk-lid, diligently writing, and took no heed of notes, or whittling, or even paper balls. Daniel Butterworth finally took Bug Higginson by the collar and stood him up behind the stove, but still the teacher wrote on. It was a letter to the minister she was writing, and her young breast heaved with mingled emotions is she wrote. It was hard to have to leave this first school, where she had been so happy, and where she could still be so happy if she only had some one to protect her from the man who would probably haunt her through life. She had felt that she must make some brief explanation of her departure to the kind old man who had trusted her, and upon whom it would fall to explain her absence. DEAR DR. MERCER [she wrote]: