It was a hot day, and not long after this, that two short-legged boys came to grief on the threshold of the school with a pail of water, which they had laboriously brought from the spring, and that Miss Mary compassionately seized the pail and started for the spring herself.  At the foot of the hill a shadow crossed her path, and a blue-shirted arm dexterously but gently relieved her of her burden.  Miss Mary was both embarrassed and angry.  “If you carried more of that for yourself,” she said spitefully to the blue arm, without deigning to raise her lashes to its owner, “you’d do better.”  In the submissive silence that followed she regretted the speech, and thanked him so sweetly at the door that he stumbled.  Which caused the children to laugh again—­a laugh in which Miss Mary joined, until the color came faintly into her pale cheek.  The next day a barrel was mysteriously placed beside the door, and as mysteriously filled with fresh spring-water every morning.

Nor was this superior young person without other quiet attentions.  “Profane Bill,” driver of the Slumgullion Stage, widely known in the newspapers for his “gallantry” in invariably offering the box-seat to the fair sex, had excepted Miss Mary from this attention, on the ground that he had a habit of “cussin’ on up grades,” and gave her half the coach to herself.  Jack Hamlin, a gambler, having once silently ridden with her in the same coach, afterward threw a decanter at the head of a confederate for mentioning her name in a barroom.  The over-dressed mother of a pupil whose paternity was doubtful had often lingered near this astute Vestal’s temple, never daring to enter its sacred precincts, but content to worship the priestess from afar.

With such unconscious intervals the monotonous procession of blue skies, glittering sunshine, brief twilights, and starlit nights passed over Red Gulch.  Miss Mary grew fond of walking in the sedate and proper woods.  Perhaps she believed, with Mrs. Stidger, that the balsamic odors of the firs “did her chest good,” for certainly her slight cough was less frequent and her step was firmer; perhaps she had learned the unending lesson which the patient pines are never weary of repeating to heedful or listless ears.  And so one day she planned a picnic on Buckeye Hill, and took the children with her.  Away from the dusty road, the straggling shanties, the yellow ditches, the clamor of restless engines, the cheap finery of shop-windows, the deeper glitter of paint and colored glass, and the thin veneering which barbarism takes upon itself in such localities, what infinite relief was theirs!  The last heap of ragged rock and clay passed, the last unsightly chasm crossed—­ how the waiting woods opened their long files to receive them!  How the children—­perhaps because they had not yet grown quite away from the breast of the bounteous Mother—­threw themselves face downward on her brown bosom with uncouth caresses, filling the air with their laughter; and how Miss Mary herself—­felinely fastidious and intrenched as she was in the purity of spotless skirts, collar, and cuffs—­forgot all, and ran like a crested quail at the head of her brood, until, romping, laughing, and panting, with a loosened braid of brown hair, a hat hanging by a knotted ribbon from her throat, she came suddenly and violently, in the heart of the forest, upon the luckless Sandy!