Tillie: A Mennonite Maid | Page 3

course the school had greeted the advice with a laugh, and Miss
Margaret had smiled with them, though she had not meant to be
facetious.
Absalom, however, had taken her suggestion seriously.
"Is your composition written, Absalom?" she was asking as Tillie
turned from the window, her contemplation of her own composition
arrested by the sound of the voice which to her was the sweetest music
in the world.
"No'm," sullenly answered Absalom. "I didn't get it through till it was
time a'ready."
"But, Absalom, you've been at it this whole blessed day! You've not
done another thing!"
"I wrote off some of it."
"Well," sighed Miss Margaret, "let us hear what you have done."
Absalom unfolded a sheet of paper and laboriously read:
"GIRLS
"The only thing I took particular notice to, about Girls, is that they are
always picking lint off each other, still."
He stopped and slowly folded his paper.
"But go on," said Miss Margaret. "Read it all.'
"That's all the fu'ther I got."
Miss Margaret looked at him for an instant, then suddenly lifted the lid
of her desk, evidently to search for something. When she closed it her
face was quite grave.
"We'll have the reading-lesson now," she announced.
Tillie tried to withdraw her attention from the teacher and fix it on her
own work, but the gay, glad tone in which Lizzie Harnish was reading
the lines,
"When thoughts Of the last bitter hour come like a blight Over thy
spirit--"
hopelessly checked the flow of her ideas.
This class was large, and by the time Absalom's turn to read was
reached, "Thanatopsis" had been finished, and so the first stanza of
"The Bells" fell to him. It had transpired in the reading of

"Thanatopsis" that a grave and solemn tone best suited that poem, and
the value of this intelligence was made manifest when, in a voice of
preternatural solemnity, he read:
"What a world of merriment their melody foretells!"
Instantly, when he had finished his "stanza," Lizzie raised her hand to
offer a criticism. "Absalom, he didn't put in no gestures."
Miss Margaret's predecessor had painstakingly trained his reading-
classes in the Art of Gesticulation in Public Speaking, and Miss
Margaret found the results of his labors so entertaining that she had
never been able to bring herself to suppress the monstrosity.
"I don't like them gestures," sulkily retorted Absalom.
"Never mind the gestures," Miss Margaret consoled him--which
indifference on her part seemed high treason to the well-trained class.
"I'll hear you read, now, the list of synonyms you found in these two
poems," she added. "Lizzie may read first."
While the class rapidly leafed their readers to find their lists of
synonyms, Miss Margaret looked up and spoke to Tillie, reminding her
gently that that composition would not be written by half-past three if
she did not hasten her work.
Tillie blushed with embarrassment at being caught in an idleness that
had to be reproved, and resolutely bent all her powers to her task.
She looked about the room for a subject. The walls were adorned with
the print portraits of "great men,"--former State superintendents of
public instruction in Pennsylvania,--and with highly colored chromo
portraits of Washington, Lincoln, Grant, and Garfield. Then there were
a number of framed mottos: "Education rules in America," "Rely on
yourself," "God is our hope," "Dare to say No," "Knowledge is power,"
"Education is the chief defense of nations."
But none of these things made Tillie's genius to burn, and again her
eyes wandered to the window and gazed out into the blue sky; and after
a few moments she suddenly turned to her desk and rapidly wrote down
her "subject"--"Evening."
The mountain of the opening sentence being crossed, the rest went
smoothly enough, for Tillie wrote it from her heart.
"EVENING.
"I love to take my little sisters and brothers and go out, still, on a
hill-top when the sun is setting so red in the West, and the birds are

singing around us, and the cows are coming home to be milked, and the
men are returning from their day's work.
"I would love to play in the evening if I had the dare, when the children
are gay and everything around me is happy.
"I love to see the flowers closing their buds when the shades of evening
are come. The thought has come to me, still, that I hope the closing of
my life may come as quiet and peaceful as the closing of the flowers in
the evening.
"MATILDA MARIA GETZ."
Miss Margaret was just calling for Absalom's synonyms when Tillie
carried her composition to the desk, and Absalom was replying with his
customary half-defiant sullenness.
"My pop he sayed I ain't got need to waste my time gettin' learnt them
cinnamons.