A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill

								

young and pretty governesses, all of whom had succumbed to the charms of
neighboring country swains, and abandoned their young charge, to start
establishments of their own. Then came wise counsel from without and
after many tears she was sent to a boarding school in the city.
The older teachers at Miss Gibbs' Select School for Young Ladies still
recall their trials during the one year Miss Lady was enrolled. She was
pretty, yes, and clever, and lovable, oh, yes! And at this point usually
followed a number of stories of her generosity and impulsive kindness;
“but,” the conclusion always ran, “such a strange, wild little creature,
so intolerant of convention, in dress, in education, in religion. Quite
impossible in a young ladies' seminary.”
After one term of imprisonment Miss Lady escaped to the outdoor world
again, and implored her devoted “Dad” to let her grow up in ignorance,
protesting passionately that she did not want puffs on her head, and
heels on her shoes, and whalebones about her waist. That she didn't care
whether X plus Y equaled Z, or not, and that going to church and saying
the same thing a dozen times, drove all ideas of religion out of her
head. She would study at home, she declared, anything, everything he
suggested, if only she could do it, in her own way, out of doors.
So the sorely puzzled Colonel had procured her the necessary text-books,
and she had plunged into her original method of self-education. She
usually fought out her mathematical battles down by the river, using a
stick on the sand for her calculations; history she studied in the
fork of an old elm, declaiming the most dramatic episodes aloud, to the
edification of the sparrows.
In the long winter months her favorite haunt was a little unused room
over the front hall, traditionally known as the library. Its only
possible excuse for the name was its one piece of furniture, a battered
secretary containing a small collection of musty volumes that did credit
to the taste of some long-departed Carsey.
Miss Lady had discovered the library in her paper-doll days, and had
ruthlessly clipped small bonneted ladies with flounced skirts from
magazines that dated back to the first year of publication. Later she
had discovered that some of the ladies had jokes on their backs, or
rather pieces of jokes, the rest of which she hunted up in the old
magazines. It was an easy step from the magazines to the books, and in
time she knew them all, from the little dog-eared copy of Horace in the
upper left-hand corner, to the fat Don Quixote in the lower right.
In this neglected little room, with its festoons of cobwebs, its musty
smell and its sense of old, forgotten things and people, she would tuck
herself away with a pocket full of apples, to study and read by the
hour.
The Colonel had done his part, and she was determined to do hers; for
three years she kept sturdily at it, devouring the things she could