“Well, I say!  Tillie!  D’you hear that?  Why us we all heard you was goin’ to Jonas Hershey’s.”

“They decided it wasn’t convenient to take me and sent me here.”

“Now think!  If that wasn’t like Sister Jennie yet!  All right!” she announced conclusively.  “We can accommodate you to satisfaction, I guess.”

“Have you any other boarders?” the young man inquired.

“No reg’lar boarders—­except, to be sure, the Doc; and he’s lived with us it’s comin’ fifteen years, I think, or how long, till November a’ready.  It’s just our own fam’ly here and my niece where helps with the work, and the Doc.  We have a many to meals though, just passing through that way, you know.  We don’t often have more ’n one reg’lar boarder at oncet, so we just make ’em at home still, like as if they was one of us.  Now you,” she hospitably concluded, “we’ll lay in our best bed.  We don’t lay ’em in the best bed unless they’re some clean-lookin’.”

Tillie noticed as her aunt talked that while the young man listened with evident interest, his eyes moved about the room, taking in every detail of it.  To Tillie’s mind, this hotel parlor was so “pleasing to the eye” as to constitute one of those Temptations of the Enemy against which her New Mennonite faith prescribed most rigid discipline.  She wondered whether the stranger did not think it very handsome.

The arrangement of the room was evidently, like Jonas Hershey’s flower-beds, the work of a mathematical genius.  The chairs all stood with their stiff backs squarely against the wall, the same number facing each other from the four sides of the apartment.  Photographs in narrow oval frames, six or eight, formed another oval, all equidistant from the largest, which occupied the dead center, not only of this group, but of the wall from which it depended.  The books on the square oak table, which stood in the exact middle of the floor, were arranged in cubical piles in the same rigid order.  Tillie saw the new teacher’s glance sweep their titles:  “Touching Incidents, and Remarkable Answers to Prayer”; “From Tannery to White House”; “Gems of Religious Thought,” by Talmage; “History of the Galveston Horror; Illustrated”; “Platform Echoes, or Living Truths for Heart and Head,” by John B. Gough.

“Lemme see—­your name’s Fairchilds, ain’t?” the landlady abruptly asked.

“Yes,” bowed the young man.

“Will you, now, take it all right if I call you by your Christian name?  Us Mennonites daresent call folks Mr. and Mrs. because us we don’t favor titles.  What’s your first name now?”

Mr. Fairchilds considered the question with the appearance of trying to remember.  “You’d better call me Pestalozzi,” he answered, with a look and tone of solemnity.

“Pesky Louzy!” Mrs. Waekernagel exclaimed.  “Well, now think!  That’s a name where ain’t familiar ’round here.  Is it after some of your folks?”

“It was a name I think I bore in a previous incarnation as a teacher of youth,” Fairchilds gravely replied.