I well remember Deacon Cole. I used always to see him in one of the front pews at church. Every Sunday morning he drove by our home, and he was usually the very first to pass. He wore a ruffled shirt, a long black coat, and a collar that almost hid his chin. His face was long and sad, and he never looked to the right or left during the services at the church. I had no doubt he was a very holy man. He always took up the collection just before the benediction had been said, and his boots would creak as he tiptoed from pew to pew. I did not know just what a deacon was, or how anyone ever happened to be a deacon. I remember I once asked my father; and although he could tell me all about Cæsar and Plato and Herodotus, he could never make it clear how Mr. Cole ever became “Deacon Cole.” But one day when I was down at the mill, a farmer drove up to the door with a load of corn. He wore overalls, an old patched coat, and a big straw hat. I looked at him closely before I could believe that he was Deacon Cole, and then slowly another illusion was dissolved. I found that a deacon was a man just like my father and other men that I had known. CHAPTER XIV ABOUT GIRLS In Farmington the girls were of small account. Of course we had to tolerate them, for all of us had sisters, and then, too, we were told that we ought to treat them more kindly than the boys: but still we never really wanted them around. The girls were much prettier than the boys, and they had on clean clothes, and generally shoes, and they wore red or blue ribbons around their necks and white or colored sashes around their waists, and their hair was combed and fixed in long twists and tied with ribbon every day; and it was almost always as smooth and nice at night as when they came to school in the morning. As for us boys, our mothers combed our hair in the morning before we went to school, and occasionally with a fine-tooth comb; and when we left home it was usually parted on the side, and had no snarls, and lay down smoothly on the top of our heads,—but of course it was different before we got home. Sometimes even on our way to school we would turn somersaults, or walk on our hands, or “skin a cat” on the limb of a tree, and then our caps would fall off and our hair get pretty badly mussed. Then, too, we often ran and got warm, and had to take off our caps and fan ourselves, and run our hands through our hair; and sometimes we wrestled and fell down, and things like that; and when we were not playing ball we often went in swimming at noon, and of course we could not keep our hair straight, and did not much care or try. But the girls were different; they never would do anything that hurt their hair, and if it got mussed the least little bit they always stopped and combed it out so that it looked almost as well as when they went to school. Generally they had little pocket looking-glasses; but even if