"Oh, my," she laughed one day as she and David were speaking of school happenings, "do you remember how John Schneider used to say Memory Gems? The day he got up and said, 'Have-you-heard-the-waters-singing-little-May --where-the-willows-green-are-bending-over-the-way--do-you-know-how-low- and-sweet-are-the-words-the-waves-repeat--to-the-pebbles-at-their-feet-- night-and-day?'" David laughed at the girl's droll imitation, the way she sing-songed the verse in the exact manner prevalent in many rural schools. "And do you remember," he asked, "the day Isaac Hunchberger defined bipeds?" "Oh, yes! I'll never forget that! It was the day the County Superintendent of Schools came to visit our school and Miss Lee was anxious to have us show off. Isaac showed off, all right, with his 'Bipets are sings vis two lex!' I guess Miss Lee decided that day that the Pennsylvania Dutch is ingrained in our English and hard to get out." To Phœbe each Memory Gem of her school days became, in truth, a gem stored away for future years. Long after she had outgrown the little rural school scraps of poetry returned to her to rewaken the enthusiasm of childhood and to teach her again to "hear the lark within the songless egg and find the fountain where they wailed, 'Mirage!'" Phœbe wanted so many things in those school-day years but she wanted most of all to become like Miss Lee. So earnestly did she try to speak as her teacher taught her that after a time the peculiar idioms and expressions became more infrequent and there was only a delightfully quaint inflection, an occasional phrase, to betray her Pennsylvania Dutch parentage. But in times of stress or excitement she invariably slipped back into the old way and prefaced her exclamations with an expressive "Ach!" Life on the Metz farm went on in even tenor year in and year out. Maria Metz never changed to any appreciable extent her mode of living or her methods of working, and she tried to teach Phœbe to conform to the same monotonous existence and live as several generations of Metzes had done. But Phœbe was a veritable Evelyn Hope, made of "spirit, fire and dew." The distinctiveness of her personality grew more pronounced as she slipped from childhood into girlhood and Maria Metz needed often to encourage her own heart for the task of rearing into ideal womanhood the daughter of her brother Jacob. Phœbe had a deep love for nature and this love was fostered by her sturdy farmer-father. As she followed him about the fields he taught her the names of wild flowers, told her the nesting haunts of birds, initiated her into the circle of tree-lore, taught her to keep ears, eyes and heart open for the treasures of the great outdoors.