The joy and relief she felt at the doctor’s scheme, which she was quite sure would work out successfully, gave her a self-confidence in the ordeal before her that sharpened her wits almost to brilliancy.  She sailed through this examination, which otherwise she would have dreaded unspeakably, with an aplomb that made her a stranger to herself.  Even that bugbear of the examination labeled by the superintendent, “General Information,” and regarded with suspicion by the applicants as a snare and a delusion, did not confound Tillie in her sudden and new-found courage; though the questions under this head brought forth from the applicants such astonishing statements as that Henry VIII was chiefly noted for being “a great widower”; and that the Mother of the Gracchi was “probably Mrs. Gracchi.”

In her unwonted elation, Tillie even waxed a bit witty, and in the quiz on “Methods of Discipline,” she gave an answer which no doubt led the superintendent to mark her high.

“What method would you pursue with a boy in your school who was addicted to swearing?” she was asked.

“I suppose I should make him swear off!” said Tillie, with actual flippancy.

A neat young woman of the class, sitting directly in front of the superintendent, and wearing spectacles and very straight, tight hair, cast a shocked and reproachful look upon Tillie, and turning to the examiner, said primly, “I would organize an anti-swearing society in the school, and reward the boys who were not profane by making them members of it, expelling those who used any profane language.”

“And make every normal boy turn blasphemer in derision, I’m afraid,” was the superintendent’s ironical comment.

When, at four o’clock that afternoon, she drove back with the doctor through the winter twilight, bearing her precious certificate in her bosom, the brightness of her face seemed to reflect the brilliancy of the red sunset glow on snow-covered fields, frozen creek, and farm-house windows.

“Bully fur you, Matilda!” the doctor kept repeating at intervals.  “Now won’t Miss Margaret be tickled, though!  I tell you what, wirtue like hern gits its rewards even in this here life.  She’ll certainly be set up to think she’s made a teacher out of you unbeknownst!  And mebbe it won’t tickle her wonderful to think how she’s beat Jake Getz!” he chuckled.

“Of course you’re writin’ to her to-night, Tillie, ain’t you?” he asked.  “I’d write her off a letter myself if writin’ come handier to me.”

“Of course I shall let her know at once,” Tillie replied; and in her voice, for the first time in the doctor’s acquaintance with her, there was a touch of gentle complacency.

“I’ll get your letter out the tree-holler to-morrow morning, then, when I go a-past—­and I can stamp it and mail it fur you till noon.  Then she’ll get it till Monday morning yet!  By gum, won’t she, now, be tickled!”

“Isn’t it all beautiful!” Tillie breathed ecstatically.  “I’ve got my certificate and the teacher won’t be put out!  What did Adam Oberholzer and Joseph Kettering say, Doc?”