There was another influence besides her books and Miss Margaret’s letters which, unconsciously to herself, was educating Tillie at this time.  Her growing fondness for stealing off to the woods not far from the farm, of climbing to the hill-top beyond the creek, or walking over the fields under the wide sky—­not only in the spring and summer, but at all times of the year—­was yielding her a richness, a depth and breadth, of experience that nothing else could have given her.

A nature deeply sensitive to the mysterious appeal of sky and green earth, of deep, shady forest and glistening water, when unfolding in daily touch with these things, will learn to see life with a broader, saner mind and catch glimpses and vistas of truth with a clearer vision than can ever come to one whose most susceptible years are spent walled in and overtopped by the houses of the city that shut out and stifle “the larger thought of God.”  And Tillie, in spite of her narrowing New Mennonite “convictions,” did reach through her growing love for and intimacy with Nature a plane of thought and feeling which was immeasurably above her perfunctory creed.

Sometimes the emotions excited by her solitary walks gave the young girl greater pain than happiness—­yet it was a pain she would not have been spared, for she knew, though the knowledge was never formulated in her thought, that in some precious, intimate way her suffering set her apart and above the villagers and farming people about her—­those whose placid, contented eyes never strayed from the potato-patch to the distant hills, or lifted themselves from the goodly tobacco-fields to the wide blue heavens.

Thus, cramped and crushing as much of her life was, it had—­as all conditions must have—­its compensations; and many of the very circumstances which at the time seemed most unbearable brought forth in later years rich fruit.

And so, living under her father’s watchful eye and relentless rule,—­with long days of drudgery and outward acquiescence in his scheme of life that she devote herself, mind, body, and soul, to the service of himself, his wife, and their children, and in return to be poorly fed and scantily clad,—­Tillie nevertheless grew up in a world apart, hidden to the sealed vision of those about her; as unknown to them in her real life as though they had never looked upon her face; and while her father never for an instant doubted the girl’s entire submission to him, she was day by day waxing stronger in her resolve to heed Miss Margaret’s constant advice and make a fight for her right to the education her father had denied her, and for a life other than that to which his will would consign her.

There were dark times when her steadfast purpose seemed impossible of fulfilment.  But Tillie felt she would rather die in the struggle than become the sort of apathetic household drudge she beheld in her stepmother—­a condition into which it would be so easy to sink, once she loosed her wagon from its star.