New York Dispatch

MARGARET'S INDEPENDENCE

BY MATTIE WINEIELD TORREY

"Margaret," shrieked Grandma Jessup, in an agony of consternation, "you never can mean it! A girl of your position in life. Think of the endless talk it will cause. What will society say?"

"Oh, bother society!" said Margaret, "I beg pardon, grandma; I didn't mean to horrify you with slang, but I want you to understand that I don't care for the opinion of society, to any alarming extent, so long as I am doing right"

"Right, right!" cried Grandma Jessup, wrathfully. "You're forever talking of right and wrong. As if a girl like you were competent to judge of what is proper! You to fly in the face of Providence in this style, and then talk of doing right! It's abominable! It's atrocious! You cannot expect me to countenance the proceeding."

"Grandma," said Margaret, calmly, "listen to me. I'm sorry you don't approve of my plan; but I've quite made up my mind"

"Oh, you have, have you?" sniffed grandma. "I wonder you condescend to inform me of the fact. In my day girls came to their elders to seek advice, not to inform them of decisions already made. But nous avons change tout cela!"

"Grandma," said Margaret, in despair, "if you love me you will not attempt to hinder my going. I cannot remain here and retain my own self-respect. When my father made his will, and inserted the absurd clause by which I was to share his estate equally with my cousin, providing I married him, and failing to do that, my share was forfeited, he could not have been in his right mind."

"Oh, oh!" shrieked grandma; "to accuse your own father of insanity, and he dead and gone!"

"At least," continued Margaret, patiently, "he could not have considered all the circumstances of the case—the sudden misery it might entail upon me provided I married merely to retain my patrimony, and without caring for my cousin; the embarrassments and difficulties that would naturally spring from such a proviso are sufficient to have deterred him from inserting it had he given the subject due reflection.'"

"He wanted to keep the property in the family. The Mastersons have always been rich," said grandma, complacently. "We come of one of the oldest and most aristocratic families in the State. The men have always been honorable and the women beautiful. No Masterson has yet earned his bread by manual labor. Child, child, why will you not give up this mad scheme, and wait until your Cousin Philip comes back?"

"And get scorned for my pains," said Margaret, bitterly. "Grandma, do you not see that my cousin feels the galling of the fetter just as I feel it? Philip Masterson will be as glad to be free as I shall be to release him from the performance of his share of this imposed contract. Grandma, are you a woman, and can you yet counsel me to forget my womanhood so far as to do this thing? I give up my share of the estate willingly. It is his, and he is free. See, I have told him in this note which you will please forward to him when I am gone. Now I am poor, and why should I not work, like any other poor girl? I see no disgrace in the mere fact of earning my daily bread. I have written to Mr. Woodson, and he has secured me a situation as teacher in the school at Wytheville."

"Margaret, you shall not go! A teacher, indeed, in a little back country village! Of what are you thinking? You shall stay with me. I need you."

"No, grandma, you do not need me. Thank you all the same, though. I have led an idle aimless sort of life long enough. I always knew I was intended for something beside a fashionable young lady, and here is an opening for the immediate employ of my talents."

"I should think so!" said grandma, with infinite scorn. "You'll have a grand theatre upon which to display your abilities. What good will your French, and German, and music, and drawing do you, among those clod hoppers? You'll be marrying a farmer, and settling down to the tending of pigs and chickens, next. Actually, I don't know but it is my duty to get you put in an asylum. You are clearly out of your head, and incapable of taking care of yourself."

"I'll show you how nicely I can take care of myself," laughed Margaret. "I am going to Wytheville on Monday, in order to demonstrate that fact to your full and clear apprehension."

"I don't see that it does the least bit of good to talk to you," said grandma, fretfully, "you will have your own way. But you won't be so sanguine by the time you've tried the experiment for three months. School-teaching isn't the most delightful work in the world, I'll be bound, and it won't take more than one trial to strip it of the romance with which you invest it."

"Foolish girl!" soliloquized grandma, after Margaret had taken herself off to pack her trunks. "Earn her own living, indeed! If Philip were only here! He wrote me he was coming this Spring, too. And that's what has started this sudden freak of hers. They have never met, for Philip has always been kiting about over Europe, or somewhere, and the only visits I ever had from him were paid during Margaret's absence at school. Let me see; he must be in Florence by this. I think I'll write, just to give him an idea how the case stands."

Grandma's idea of the case was rather an extensive one, judging from the closely-written sheets which were inserted into an envelope bearing the Masterson crest and seal, and dispatched that very day to her grandson. And here let us leave Grandma Jessup in her luxurious city home, waited on by obsequious servants who had grown gray in her service, consoled by her cats and her poodle, while we follow Margaret,

Wytheville was a pretty New England village, with a church, a school, and no end of neat white houses facing its three or four quiet streets, each with its respective garden, or strip of meadow, or orchard, lying back from the highway, giving the place that air of rural quiet and seclusion which belong particularly to New England villages. Nowhere else can one so fairly combine the conveniences of a town with the pleasure of living in the country.

Margaret found it very delightful. She boarded with the Woodson family—old acquaintances of her father—and was thus enabled to feel at home from the first.

It was early Spring, and as she passed down the long street, beneath the budding elms, and along the grass-bordered pathway to her school, she felt the sweet influences of the season sink deep into her soul, and thought that in all her previous life she had never been so happy.

Her duties in the school-room were pleasant and light; she soon taught her little charges to love her, and in the training of their young minds she became absorbed and quite forgetful of self. Hopeful, and patient, and gentle, yet full of all womanly pride and courage, she went on her way with zealous and unwearied heart, giving no heed to the past with its memories of luxurious idleness, its riches now no longer hers, and solely intent upon doing her duty in the present.

And so the Spring passed and the Summer deepened, the field strawberries ripened, and the meadow grass grew tall, and was ready to be laid low by the scythe of the stout mower; but where were the necessary laborers to be procured? This was the question Farmer Woodson was asking himself one evening, as he leaned over his gate and looked across at the promising field which must be mowed on the morrow.

"I declare, it's too bad! That grass needs to be cut at once, if it's to make decent hay, and I have my hands full without it. Too bad! Wish I could find

"What d'ye say, sir?" for a stranger had passed before his gate and accosted him.

"Do you want to hire a hand?"

"Yes, sir, I just do. Want one more than I ever wanted anything before in all my life. Do you want to hire out?" peering through the dusk to get a glimpse of the face of his questioner.

"Yes."

"Walk right in, and we'll settle matters right up, or I'm mistaken. Ever work at haying much?"

"No."

"Pshaw! that's bad. Where are you from?"

"From the city."

"Well, I guess you'll learn—at least we'll try you, for I'm powerful short of help this season. Wife! wife!" he called out, leading the way into the room where Mrs. Woodson and Margaret were sitting in the twilight—"I've found some help at last. This gentleman—I neglected to ask your name, sir?"

"Harley, sir."

"Well, Mr. Harley," said the democratic farmer, "these ladies are my wife, Mrs. Woodson, and Miss Lester. And now let's have a light, for I've no idea of sitting here as you ladies do, as if I were an owl and could see in the dark."

When the light was brought out the new comer was found to be a stalwart man of perhaps five-and-twenty, with every appearance of gentlemanly bearing.

"O dear!" whispered Josie, the little daughter of the household, "he's got hair all over his face, and his eyes are so black!"

A warning gesture from her teacher stopped further essay at criticism.

"He was awkward enough at first," said Mr. Woodson, the following day, "but I never saw anyone learn to handle a scythe in so short a time. O yes, he'll do. Says he came out for his health. Looks must be mighty deceptive, for he's the very picture of health now, and no amount of country air could give him a ruddier countenance."

"'Taint them as looks the best that's always the healthiest," said Mrs. Woodson, sympathetically. "You must see that he doesn't overwork. Poor, dear young man! I thought he didn't eat much breakfast this morning; I'll get up something nice for lunch and send it out precisely at ten o'clock."

And Mrs. Woodson proceeded to the concoction of one of her chef d'oeuvres of culinary skill, for she was a famous cuisinier.

When the hay was down, Josie was wild to assist in the raking, so she was supplied with a rake, from which, in her zeal, she extracted several teeth in a remarkably brief space of time. Margaret, sketch-book in hand, seated herself beneath a tree, and proceeded to sketch the novel scene.

Mr. Harley was ubiquitous; he was here, there, and everywhere. Mr. Woodson wondered how he ever got on without him. Certainly, for a city chap, he took amazingly to country ways. He professed himself charmed with the beauty of the village. Having never before been in that part of the country, it was all new, and charming, and delightful, and when the labors of the day were over, and he joined Margaret on the porch, where she was putting a few finishing touches to her little sketch of the hayfield scene, he was enthusiastic in praise of the simple village life which she had herself found so pleasant.

He was quite a puzzle to Margaret. Educated and refined he certainly was. Looking at his hands, she saw they were as white and shapely as her own. Evidently he had not been accustomed to manual labor. The more she saw of him, the more she was mystified and at a loss to know what to think of a man who talked on any subject with the ease and fluency of a finished scholar, and then shouldered his scythe and marched off to the hay-field, talking just as sagely with the farmer respecting the rotation of crops, and the relative merits of clover and timothy. And the more she came in contact with him, the more she fell to thinking of him, turning over his words, wondering at the strange contradictions she could not understand.

Ah, those were pleasant weeks for Margaret Lester. But they came to an end, for the haying season, naturally, couldn't last forever, and Mr. Woodson's hurry being over, he felt himself compelled to part with his "hired man," although reluctant to do so, for he had grown to feel a great respect and friendship for him.

"Miss Lester," said Harley, the night before his departure, "shall I offend if I ask leave to correspond with you? I am going back to the city, but I feel that I should like to be informed of the welfare of my Wytheville acquaintances, and if you will allow me to write to you, and promise to answer now and then, I think I shall be better able to endure my enforced absence from these sylvan scenes. Our acquaintance has been brief, but, to me at least, pleasant, and I should not like to lose entirely my place in your memory of these halcyon days."

"Thank you," said Margaret, frankly. "I will answer your letters, Mr. Harley."

So Mr. Harley went away, and it was not long before the post-mistress at Wytheville observed to one of her cronies that "something was going on between Mr. Woodson's hired man and the schoolma'am, for he had sent her a letter, and she had written one in return.'"

How Margaret enjoyed those letters I never could tell you. She saw more plainly the wealth of intellect possessed by the writer: was brought closer to him by this unrestrained interchange of thought. She learned to watch for the coming of those well-filled sheets, and, not to prolong the denouement, she became so absorbed in the writer that when he confessed his love for her, and demanded to know, like the true man that he was, whether she could return that love, and, if so, conjuring her to bid him come to her, Margaret could only write the simple word "Come." But that brought him to her side. And really it did look as if Grandma Jessup's prophecy concerning the farmer whom her granddaughter was to marry was about coming true.

Grandma was sitting one morning with her fat poodle on its silken cushion beside her, and Pearl, her favorite cat, asleep on the hearth-rug, when in on the quiet of her room came Margaret, her cheeks glowing, her eyes bright, and a queer air of decision in the very fall of her foot upon the Turkey carpet. Behind her there appeared the fine face of Mr. Harley.

"Well," said grandma, kissing the girl on both pink cheeks, "so you've come back? Tired enough of your independence, I suppose. Found school-teaching harder than you expected, didn't you?"

"If you please, grandma, this gentleman accompanied me. Will you allow me to introduce

"Pooh!" said grandma, "Mr. Harley and I are old friends."

"Grandma," cried Margaret, in consternation, "I didn't know—"

"That Philip Harley's full name was Philip Harley Masterson? No, I presume not. But I knew it. You thought you'd outwit me, but I have proved myself a fair match for you."

And grandma laughed until she could laugh no more.

"Philip," said Margaret, in a state of perplexity, pitiable to see, "what does she mean?"

"Just this, my dear. I learned your prejudice against me in fact, I received a very pretty little note, politely turning over to me a certain young lady's share of her father's estate, and briefly informing me that the said young lady declined to considered in the light of an aspirant for matrimonial honors. Its reception brought me home from my long wanderings on the first steamer. I resolved to go up to Wytheville and form your acquaintance in an assumed character. Grandma was in my secret. She encouraged me with the hope of ultimate success. I loved you, Margaret, from the first, and put forth every effort to gain your love. As Philip Harley, the 'hired man,' I won you. Can you forgive the deception, and love me still, when you know me as your Cousin Philip Masterson?"

I think Margaret must have granted him absolution, for Grandma Jessup is in a perfect flutter of excitement, attending to the ordering of an elegant trousseau, and the wedding is to take place immediately. And that was the way Margaret's independence culminated.