Page:Dorothy Canfield--Hillsboro People.djvu/174



Hannah went home with her head full of new ideas, and with four books in her saddle-bags—which, for those days, was a large library. These were the Bible, the "Universal Preceptor," a volume of the Shakespeare comedies, and Plutarch's "Lives." Armed with these weapons, how she did stir things up in Hillsboro! She got the children together into a school, and taught them everything she had learned in Heath Falls; and that was so much—what with the studying which she always kept up by herself—that from our little scrap of a village three students went down to the college at William's Town, in Massachusetts, the first year it was started, and there has been a regular procession of them ever since.

After a time she married Giles Wheeler, and began to teach her own children—she had nine—and very well instructed they were. She was too busy, then, to go into the schoolroom to teach; but never, then or later, even when she was an old, old woman, did she take her vigilant eyes and her managing hand off the schools of our county.

It was due to her that Hillsboro could boast for so long that its percentage of illiterates was zero. If, by chance, anyone grew up without knowing how to read, Aunt Hannah pounced on him and made him learn, whether he would or not. She loaned about, to anyone who would read them, the books she brought from Heath Falls; and in time she started a little library. Remembering the days when Captain Winthrop had read aloud to her in the granary, she had her children go about to read aloud