It was a never-to-be-forgotten holiday for those three girls. They took part in all the activities of the farm. They picked fruit and helped Mrs. Benjamin and the cook to can the big supplies of jam and jelly for the school. They helped in the garden with the vegetables or worked and weeded Mrs. Benjamin's beloved flowers. They pitched hay, they drove the rake and the grass cutter. They were busy in the open from morning until night and as happy as field larks.
Lessons had stopped, but education went on. They read aloud with Mrs. Benjamin; they studied and learned, first hand, of Nature's prodigality or niggardliness. Always there was the cultivation of the spirit. Love and fair dealing made the foundation upon which these simple Quaker folk had builded their lives, and no one could live in the home of their making without feeling that these were as essential to life as breathing.
Isabelle had long, wild gallops over the hills on her horse, during which she pondered "the long, long thoughts of youth" and brought the resulting problems to Mrs. Benjamin in the weekly letters, or in some of their intimate talks.
"It is hard to believe that this is the freakish sullen child who came to us less than a year ago," Mrs. Benjamin commented as the girls went off to bed one night.
"No, it is wonderful. Thou hast made a new being of her."
"Thou hast done it as much as I have. It is evidently her first experience of being understood and loved."
"What strange excrescences do grow up on our so-called civilization," he said.
"Is thee calling the rich an excrescence?" she smiled.
"I know that they are just human beings like ourselves, but how do they get things so awry? They put such a slight upon parenthood, with their servant-made children."
She nodded, and he went on developing his thought.
"It is ominous when the basic relationships are so abused--marriage held so lightly, children disdaining their own parents, as our Isabelle does. Where is it leading us, Phoebe?"
"Dear knows--dear knows!" she sighed, shaking her head.
It was a well-worn theme with them. They had to ponder deeply these tendencies, for it was their work to try to counteract these destructive forces--to build up in the hearts of these servant-made children, as Mr. Benjamin called them, a respect for God and man and the holy things that grow out of their relationship.