Elnora. "I couldn't bear to spend so much on myself and nothing at all on you. I was afraid to buy the dress I should have liked to, and I thought the book would be company, while I was gone. I haven't read it, but I do hope it's good."
"Good! It's the biggest piece of foolishness I have read in all my life. I've laughed all day, ever since I found it. I had a notion to go out and read some of it to the cows and see if they wouldn't laugh."
"If it made you laugh, it's a wise book," said Elnora.
"Wise!" cried Mrs. Comstock. "You can stake your life it's a wise book. It takes the smartest man there is to do this kind of fooling," and she began laughing again.
Elnora, highly satisfied with her purchase, went to her room and put on her working clothes. Thereafter she made a point of getting a book that she thought would interest her mother, from the library every week, and leaving it on the sitting room table. Every night she carried home at least two school books and studied until she had mastered the points of each lesson. She did her share of the work faithfully, and every available minute she was in the fields searching for cocoons, for the moths promised to become her best source of income.
She gathered large baskets of nests, flowers, mosses, insects, and all sorts of natural history specimens and sold them to the grade teachers. At first she tried to tell these instructors what to teach their pupils about the specimens; but recognizing how much more she knew than they, one after another begged her to study at home, and use
