“If I could only help,” Madeline said one evening when they sat talking over their troubles; “but there’s nothing I can do, unless I apply for our school this summer. Mr. Green is the committee-man; he likes us, and I don’t believe but what he’ll let me have it. I mean to go and see;” and, before the old people had recovered from their astonishment, Madeline had caught her bonnet and shawl and was flying down the road. 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 inquire what others thought of a child like her becoming a school-mistress. The people thought well of it, and before the close of the next day it was generally known through Honedale, as the southern part of Devonshire was called, that pretty little Maddy Clyde had been engaged as teacher, and was to receive three dollars a week, with the understanding that she must board herself. It did not take Madeline long to calculate that twelve times three dollars were thirty-six dollars, 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 which there was in certain lights a reddish tinge, which added to its richness and 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 differ. There’s a new committee-man, that Dr. Holbrook, from Boston, and new ones are apt to be mighty strict, and especially young ones like him. They say he is mighty larned, and can speak in furrin tongues.”