“Flossy and I now look with utmost toleration on the dark element that is to be introduced.  I tell Ruth that I am really grateful to the authorities for introducing something that a person of my limited capacities can appreciate, and Flossy, with her sweet little charitable voice, has ‘no doubt they will choose proper things to sing.’  That little mouse is really more agreeable than she ever was in her life; and I am amazed at it, too.  I expected the dear baby would make us all uncomfortable with her finified whims; but don’t you think it is our lofty Ruth who is decidedly the most disagreeable of our party, save and except myself!”

This interesting epistle was brought to a sudden close by an interruption.  A gentleman came with rapid steps, and halted before her tent door, which was tied hospitably back.

“I beg pardon,” he said, speaking rapidly, “but this is Miss Rider?”

“It is not,” Eurie answered, with promptness at which information he looked surprised and bewildered.

“Isn’t this her tent?  I am sorry to trouble you, but I have been sent in haste for her.  She is wanted for a consultation, and I was told I would find her here.  Perhaps I might leave a message with you for her?”

“It certainly isn’t her tent,” Eurie said, trying to keep down the desire to laugh, “and I haven’t the least idea where she is.  I should be glad to give her your message if I could, but I never saw the lady in my life, and have no reason to expect that pleasure.”

Whereupon her questioner laughed outright.

“That is a dilemma,” he said.  “I appreciate your feelings, for I am precisely in the same position; but the lady was described minutely to me, and I certainly thought I had found her.  I am sorry to have interrupted you,” and he bowed himself away.

A new curiosity seized upon Eurie—­the desire to see Miss Rider.  “She must be one of them,” she soliloquized, falling into Flossy’s way of speaking of the workers at Chautauqua.  “He said she was wanted for a consultation.  I wonder if she can be one of those who are to take part in the primary exercises?  She must be young for such prominent work if she looks like me; but how could he know that since he never saw her?  It is very evident that I am to go to Sunday-school next Sabbath anyhow, if I never did before, for now I have two items of interest to look up—­a lesson that is in the ’fifth chapter, from the fifth to the fifteenth verse of something,’ and a being called ‘Miss Rider.’” So thinking she hastily concluded and folded her letter, ready for the afternoon mail, without a thought or care as to the seed that she had been sending away in it, or as to the fruit it might bear; without the slightest insight into the way she was being led through seeming mistakes and accidents up to a point that was to influence all her future.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE NEW LESSON.