She chose a nice, flat little piece of the United States, situated in the shade of the clump of willows that bordered a trickling creek not far from her sylvan bath-room of the early morning.  How she was to sit on the ground all day and yet preserve a properly pedagogical demeanor was the first question to be settled.  That there was nothing even remotely resembling a chair in camp she felt reasonably assured, as “paw” was sitting on an inverted soap-box under a pine-tree, and “paw,” by reason of age and infirmity, appropriated all luxuries.  Mrs. Yellett, with her usual acumen, grasped the situation.

“I’m figgerin’,” she commented, “that there must be easier ways of governin’ than sittin’ up like a prairie-dog while you’re at it.”

Mrs. Yellett took a hurried survey of the camp, lessening the distance between herself and one of the light wagons with a gait in which grace was entirely subservient to speed; then, with one capacious wrench of the arms, she loosened the spring seat from the wagon and bore it to the governess with an artless air of triumph.  It was difficult, under these circumstances, to explain to Mrs. Yellett that without that symbol of scholastic authority, a desk, the wagon seat was useless.  Nevertheless, Mary set forth, with all her eloquence, the mission of a desk.  Mrs. Yellett was genuinely depressed.  Had she imported the magician without his wand—­Aladdin without his lamp?  She proposed a bewildering choice—­an inverted wash-tub, two buckets sustaining the relation of caryatides to a board, the sheet-iron cooking-stove.  In an excess of solicitude she even suggested robbing “paw” of his soap-box.

Mary chose the wash-tub on condition that Mrs. Yellett consented to sacrifice the handles in the cause of lower education.  She felt that an inverted tub that was likely to see-saw during class hours would tend rather to develop a sense of humor in her pupils than to contribute to her pedagogical dignity.

The camp, as may already have been inferred, enjoyed a matriarchal form of government.  Its feminine dictator was no exception to the race of autocrats in that she was not an absolute stranger to the rosy byways of self-indulgence.  There was a strenuous quality in her pleasuring perhaps not inconsistent in one whose daily tasks included sheep-herding, ditch-digging, varied by irrigating and shearing in their proper seasons.  Under the circumstances, it was not surprising that her wash-tub bore about the same relationship to her real duties as does the crochet needle or embroidery hoop to the lives of less arduously engaged women.  It was at once her fad and her relaxation, the dainty feminine accomplishment with which she whiled away the hours after a busy day spent with pick and shovel.  Of all this Mary was ignorant when she proposed that Mrs. Yellett saw off the tub-handles in the cause of culture.  However, Mrs. Yellett procured a saw, yet the hand that held it lingered in its descent on the handles.  She contemplated the tub as affectionately as Hamlet regarding the skull of “Alas, poor Yorick!”