The next six days seemed interminably long to her, but Monday came at last. All day she listened expectantly for a step on the front porch, but no one came that day or the next. Wednesday morning she was helping her father about the barn, when she heard some one behind her, and turned to face Mr. Johnston. “Hello!” he cried. “So you concluded to try farming if you couldn’t get a school?” Hilda smiled in reply. She could not trust herself to speak. So she had failed again. Mr. Johnston chatted with her father for a time, while she went bravely on with her work. It would never do to let him know how disappointed she was. “Well, Hilda,” he said, finally, “I’ll expect you to do me credit this spring.” Hilda looked up, surprised. “We concluded we would try you,” he continued. “Andrews stuck out for his cousin, but Smith went with me. Smith was quite taken with you. Andrews’ cousin had let him attend to her application, and had never come to see one of us about it. Smith didn’t like that way of doing things, and I confess I don’t, myself. You’ll get thirty-five dollars for three months. If that is satisfactory, I guess we might as well go to the house and sign the contract now.” Hilda felt that she was treading on air as she followed him to the house, and when she saw her name signed to the little slip of paper, the contract between herself and District No. 33, she secretly pinched herself to see if she were awake. She wanted to shout, but of course that would not do. But the moment Mr. Johnston was gone she seized her mother about the waist and whirled her round the room. “Just think, mamma! Just think!” she cried. “I’ve actually got a school. One hundred and five dollars, and no board to pay. Maybe, now, I won’t have to wait any longer to go to college than I had expected to do in the first place. And, mamma,” she drew her mother close and whispered in her ear, “when I get to be a professor in some big university you won’t have to work any more, and I can give you the things that I’ve wanted and wanted so long to give you.” THE IMP AND THE DRUM By Josephine Dodge Daskam Bacon It never would have happened but for Miss Eleanor’s mission class. Once a week through the winter she went in the cars to a town not far from the city, where there were a great many mills, but few schools, and talked to a crowd of the mill-hands’ little children. She did not give them lessons, exactly, but she told them stories and sang songs with them and interested them in keeping themselves and their homes clean and pretty. They were very fond of her and were continually bringing in other children, so that after the first year she gave up the small room she had rented and took them up two flights into an old dancing-hall, a little out of the center of the town.