“You are so fond of reading, Tillie, I brought you this.  You may take it home, and when you have read it, bring it back to me, and I’ll give you something else to read.”

Delighted as Tillie was to have the book for its own sake, it was yet greater happiness to handle something belonging to Miss Margaret and to realize that Miss Margaret had thought so much about her as to bring it to her.

“It’s a novel, Tillie.  Have you ever read a novel?”

“No’m.  Only li-bries.”

“What?”

“Sunday-school li-bries.  Us we’re Evangelicals, and us children we go to the Sunday-school, and I still bring home li-bry books.  Pop he don’t uphold to novel-readin’.  I have never saw a novel yet.”

“Well, this book won’t injure you, Tillie.  You must tell me all about it when you have read it.  You will find it so interesting, I’m afraid you won’t be able to study your lessons while you are reading it.”

Outside the school-room, Tillie looked at the title,—­Ivanhoe,”—­ and turned over the pages in an ecstasy of anticipation.

“Oh!  I love her!  I love her!” throbbed her little hungry heart.

II

“I’m going to learn you once!”

Tillie was obliged, when about a half-mile from her father’s farm, to hide her precious book.  This she did by pinning her petticoat into a bag and concealing the book in it.  It was in this way that she always carried home her “li-bries” from Sunday-school, for all story-book reading was prohibited by her father.  It was uncomfortable walking along the highroad with the book knocking against her legs at every step, but that was not so painful as her father’s punishment would be did he discover her bringing home a “novel”!  She was not permitted to bring home even a school-book, and she had greatly astonished Miss Margaret, one day at the beginning of the term, by asking, “Please, will you leave me let my books in school?  Pop says I darsen’t bring ’em home.”

“What you can’t learn in school, you can do without,” Tillie’s father had said.  “When you’re home you’ll work fur your wittles.”

Tillie’s father was a frugal, honest, hard-working, and very prosperous Pennsylvania Dutch farmer, who thought he religiously performed his parental duty in bringing up his many children in the fear of his heavy hand, in unceasing labor, and in almost total abstinence from all amusement and self-indulgence.  Far from thinking himself cruel, he was convinced that the oftener and the more vigorously he applied “the strap,” the more conscientious a parent was he.