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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of A Bookful of Girls, by Anna Fuller
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
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+
+
+
+
+Title: A Bookful of Girls
+
+
+Author: Anna Fuller
+
+
+
+Release Date: April 8, 2009  [eBook #28538]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A BOOKFUL OF GIRLS***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Roger Frank and the Project Gutenberg Online
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+
+A BOOKFUL OF GIRLS
+
+by
+
+ANNA FULLER
+
+                  *       *       *       *       *
+
+ By Anna Fuller
+
+ A Literary Courtship
+ A Venetian June
+ Peak and Prairie
+ Pratt Portraits
+ Later Pratt Portraits
+ One of the Pilgrims
+ Katherine Day
+ A Bookful of Girls
+
+ The Thunderhead Lady
+ By Anna Fuller and Brian Read
+
+                  *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Illustration: "Suddenly a new sound reached her ear."]
+
+A BOOKFUL OF GIRLS
+
+by
+
+ANNA FULLER
+
+Author of "Pratt Portraits," "Katherine Day," etc.
+
+Illustrated
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+G. P. Putnam's Sons
+New York and London
+
+The Knickerbocker Press
+
+Copyright, 1905
+by
+Anna Fuller
+
+The Knickerbocker Press, New York
+
+
+
+
+TO
+
+S. E. R.
+
+THE YOUNGEST OF ALL MY FRIENDS
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+                                                                  PAGE
+
+ Blythe Halliday's Voyage                                            1
+
+ Artful Madge                                                       63
+
+ The Ideas of Polly                                                130
+
+ Nannie's Theatre Party                                            196
+
+ Olivia's Sun-Dial                                                 219
+
+ Bagging a Grandfather                                             242
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+                                                                  PAGE
+
+ "Suddenly a new sound reached her ear."                _Frontispiece_
+
+ "Eleanor's eyes had wandered to the high, broad
+ north window."                                                     80
+
+ "Mufty hastily established himself across her
+ shoulder."                                                        142
+
+ "All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this
+ little hand."                                                     201
+
+ "Please ma'am, will ye gimme a bowkay?"                           227
+
+ "'Good afternoon, Grandfather,' was the
+ apparition's cheerful greeting."                                  255
+
+
+
+
+BLYTHE HALLIDAY'S VOYAGE
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE CROW'S NEST
+
+
+"You never told me how you happened to name her Blythe."
+
+The two old friends, Mr. John DeWitt and Mrs. Halliday, were reclining
+side by side in their steamer-chairs, lulled into a quiescent mood by
+the gentle, scarcely perceptible, motion of the vessel. It was an
+exertion to speak, and Mrs. Halliday replied evasively, "Do you like
+the name?"
+
+"For Blythe,--yes. But I don't know another girl who could carry it
+off so well. Tell me how it happened."
+
+Then Blythe's mother reluctantly gathered herself together for a
+serious effort, and said: "It was the old Scotch nurse who did it. She
+called her 'a blythe lassie' before she was three days old. We had
+been hesitating between Lucretia for Charles's mother and Hannah for
+mine, and we compromised on Blythe!"
+
+Upon which the speaker, allowing her eyes to close definitively, took
+on the appearance of gentle inanition which characterised nine-tenths
+of her fellow-voyagers, ranged side by side in their steamer-chairs
+along the deck.
+
+They had passed the Azores, that lovely May morning, and were headed
+for Cape St. Vincent,--the good old _Lorelei_ lounging along at her
+easiest gait, the which is also her rapidest. For there is nothing
+more deceptive than a steamer's behaviour on a calm day when the sea
+offers no perceptible resistance to the keel.
+
+Here and there an insatiable novel-reader held a paper-covered volume
+before his nose, but more often the book had slid to the deck, to be
+picked up by Gustav, the prince of deck-stewards, and carefully tucked
+in among the wraps of the unconscious owner.
+
+Just now, however, Gustav was enjoying a moment of unaccustomed
+respite from activity, for his most exacting beneficiaries were not
+sufficiently awake to demand a service of him. He had administered
+_bouillon_ and lemonade and cracked ice by the gallon; he had
+scattered sandwiches and ginger cookies broadcast among them; he had
+tenderly inquired of the invalids, "'Ow you feel?" and had cheerfully
+pronounced them, one and all, to be "mush besser"; and now he himself
+was, for a fleeting moment, the centre of interest in the one tiny
+eddy of animation on the whole length of the deck.
+
+Just aft of the awning, in the full sunshine, he was engaged in
+"posing," with the sheepish air of a person having his photograph
+taken, while a fresh, comely girl of sixteen stood, kodak in hand,
+waiting for his attitude to relax. Half a dozen spectators, elderly
+men and small boys, stood about making facetious remarks, but Gustav
+and his youthful "operator" were too much in earnest to pay them much
+heed.
+
+Blythe Halliday was usually very much in earnest; by which is not to
+be inferred that she was of an alarmingly serious cast of mind. Her
+earnestness took the form of intense satisfaction in the matter in
+hand, whatever that might be, and she had found life a succession of
+delightful experiences, of which this one of an ocean voyage was
+perhaps the most delectable of all.
+
+In one particular Blythe totally disagreed with her mother; for Mrs.
+Halliday had declared, on one of the first universally unbecoming days
+of the voyage, that it was a mystery how all the agreeable people got
+to Europe, since so few of them were ever to be discovered on an ocean
+steamer! Whereas Blythe, for her part, had never dreamed that there
+were so many interesting persons in the world as were to be discovered
+among their fellow-voyagers.
+
+Was not the big, bluff Captain himself, with his unfathomable
+sea-craft and his autocratic power, a regular old Viking such as you
+might read of in your history books, but would hardly expect to meet
+with in the flesh? And was there not a real Italian Count, elderly
+but impressive, who had dealings with no one but his valet, the latter
+being a nimble personage with a wicked eye who seemed to possess the
+faculty of starting up through the deck as if summoned by a species of
+wireless telegraphy? Best of all, was not Blythe's opposite neighbour
+at the Captain's table a shaggy, keen-eyed Englishman, figuring on the
+passenger-list as "Mr. Grey," but who was generally believed to be no
+less a personage than Hugh Dalton, the famous poet, travelling
+incognito?
+
+This latter gentleman was more approachable than the Count, and had
+taken occasion to tell Blythe some very wonderful tales, besides still
+further endearing himself to her by listening with flattering
+attention to such narratives as she was pleased to relate for his
+benefit. Indeed, they were rapidly becoming fast friends and she was
+seriously contemplating a snap-shot at his expense.
+
+Mr. Grey, meanwhile, had joined the group in the sunshine, where he
+stood, pipe in mouth, with his hands thrust deep into the pockets of
+his reefer, regarding Gustav's awkwardness with kindly amusement.
+
+"There they go, those energetic young persons!" Mr. De Witt observed,
+a few minutes later, as Blythe and the Englishman walked past, in
+search of the Captain, whom Mr. Grey had suggested as the next subject
+for photographic prowess. "Do you suppose that really is Dalton?"
+
+Mr. De Witt spoke with entire disregard of the fact that Mrs. Halliday
+appeared to be slumbering tranquilly. And indeed an interrupted nap is
+so easily made good on shipboard that Blythe used sometimes to beg her
+mother to try and "fall awake" for a minute!
+
+On this occasion, as she walked past with the alleged poet, she
+remarked: "Even Mr. De Witt can't keep Mamma awake on shipboard, and
+she isn't a bit of a sleepy person on dry land."
+
+By way of response, Mr. Grey turned to contemplate the line of
+steamer-chairs, billowy with voluminous wraps, saying: "Doesn't the
+deck look like a sea becalmed? See! Those are the waves, too lazy to
+break!"
+
+"How funny the ocean would look if the waves forgot to turn over!"
+Blythe exclaimed, glancing across the gently undulating surface of the
+sea. "I don't suppose they've kept still one single instant in
+millions of years!"
+
+"Not since the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters," her
+companion returned, with quiet emphasis; and Blythe felt surer than
+ever that he really was the great poet whom people believed him to
+be.
+
+A moment later they had stormed the bridge, where they two, of all the
+ship's company, were pretty sure of a welcome. They found the Captain
+standing, with his sextant at his eye, the four gold stripes on his
+sleeve gleaming gaily in the sunshine. Evidently things were going
+right, for the visitors and their daring proposal were most graciously
+received.
+
+The fine old sea-dog stood like a man to be shot at; and as Blythe
+faced him, kodak in hand, the breeze playing pranks with her hair and
+blowing her golf-cape straight back from her shoulders, it was all so
+exhilarating that before she knew it she had turned her little camera
+upon the supposed Hugh Dalton himself, who made an absurd grimace and
+told her to "let her go!"
+
+It was always a delightful experience for Blythe to stand on the
+bridge and watch the ship's officers at their wonderful work of
+guiding the great sea-monster across the pathless deep. Here was the
+brain of the ship, as Mr. Grey had once pointed out, and to-day, when
+a sailor suddenly appeared above the gangway and, touching his hat,
+received a curt order,--"That is one of the nerves of the vessel," her
+companion said. "It carries the message of the brain to the furthest
+parts of the body."
+
+"And I suppose the eyes are up there," Blythe returned, glancing at
+the "crow's nest," half-way up the great forward mast, where the two
+lookouts were keeping their steady watch.
+
+"Yes," he rejoined, "that must be why they always have a pair of
+them,--so as to get a proper focus. _Nicht wahr, Herr Capitaen?_"
+
+And the little fiction was explained to the Captain, who grew more
+genial than ever under the stimulus of such agreeable conversation.
+
+"_Ja wohl!_" he agreed, heartily; "_Ja wohl!_"--which was really quite
+an outburst of eloquence for Captain Seemann.
+
+"If I couldn't be captain," Blythe announced, "I think I should choose
+to be lookout."
+
+"How is dat?" the Captain inquired.
+
+"It must be the best place of all, away up above everything and
+everybody."
+
+"And you would like to go up dare?"
+
+"Of course I should!"
+
+"And you would not be afraid?"
+
+"Not I!"
+
+Upon which the Captain, in high good-humour, declared, "I belief
+you!"
+
+After that he fell to speaking German with Mr. Grey, and Blythe moved
+to the end of the bridge, and stood looking down upon the steerage
+passengers, where they were disporting themselves in the sun on the
+lower deck.
+
+They were a motley crew, and she never tired of watching them, as they
+sat about in picturesque groups, singing or playing games, or lay
+stretched on the deck, fast asleep.
+
+Somewhat apart from the others was a woman with a little girl whom
+Blythe had not before observed. The child lay on a bright shawl, her
+head against the woman's knee, her dark Italian eyes gazing straight
+up into the luminous blue of the sky. There was a curiously high-bred
+look in the pale features, young and unformed as they were, and Blythe
+wondered how such a child as that came to belong to the stout,
+middle-aged woman who did not herself seem altogether out of place in
+the rough steerage.
+
+At this point in her meditations, a quiet, matter-of-fact voice struck
+her ear, and, turning, she found that Mr. Grey had come up behind
+her.
+
+"The Captain says he will have the 'crow's nest' lowered and let you
+go up in it if you like," was the startling announcement which roused
+her from her revery.
+
+"Oh, you are making fun!" she protested.
+
+"I don't wonder you think so, but he seems quite in earnest, and I can
+tell you it's the chance of a lifetime!"
+
+"I should think it was!" she gasped. "Oh, tell him he's an angel with
+wings! And please, _please_ don't let him change his mind while I run
+and ask Mamma!" With which Blythe vanished down the gangway, her
+golf-cape rising straight up around her head as the draught took it.
+
+We may well believe that such a prospect as that drove from her mind
+all speculations as to the steerage passengers, and that even the
+thought of the little girl with the wonderful eyes did not again visit
+her in the few hours intervening.
+
+Yet when, that afternoon at eight-bells, she passed with Mr. Grey down
+the steep gangway to the steerage deck, which they were obliged to
+traverse on their way to the forecastle, and they came upon the
+little creature lying, with upturned face, against the woman's knee,
+Blythe felt a sharp pang of compunction and pity. The child looked
+even more pathetic than when seen from above, and the young girl
+involuntarily stooped in passing, and touched the wan little cheek.
+Whereupon one of those ineffable smiles which are the birthright of
+Italians lighted the little face, and the small hand was lifted with
+so captivating a gesture that Blythe, clasping it in her own, dropped
+on her knees beside the child.
+
+"Is it your little girl?" she asked, looking up into the face of the
+woman, whose marked unlikeness to the child was answer enough.
+
+"No, no, Signorina," the woman protested. "She is my little
+Signorina."
+
+"And you are taking her to Italy?"
+
+"_Si, Signorina; alla bella Italia_!"
+
+Then the lips of the little girl parted with a still more radiant
+smile, and she murmured, "_Alla bella Italia_!"
+
+A moment later, Blythe and her companion had passed on and up to the
+forward deck where, climbing a short ladder to the railing of the
+"crow's nest," they dropped lightly down into this most novel of
+elevators. There was a shrill whistle from the boatswain, the waving
+of white handkerchiefs where Mrs. Halliday and Mr. DeWitt stood,
+forward of the wheel-house, to watch the start; then the big windlass
+began to turn, the rope was "paid out," and the slow, rather creaky
+journey up the mast had begun.
+
+It was a perfect day for the adventure. The ship was not rolling at
+all, the little motion to be felt being a gentle tilt from stem to
+stern which manifested itself at long intervals in the slightest
+imaginable dip of the prow. And presently the ascent was accomplished,
+and the "crow's nest" once more clung in its accustomed place against
+the mast,--forty feet up in the air, according to Mr. Grey's
+reckoning.
+
+As they looked across the great sea the horizon seemed to have receded
+to an incalculable distance, and the airs that came to them across
+that broad expanse, unsullied by the faintest trace of man or his
+works, were purer than are often vouchsafed to mortals. Blythe felt
+her heart grow big with the sense of space and purity, and this
+wonderful swift passage through the upper air. Involuntarily she took
+off her hat to get the full sweep of the breeze upon her forehead.
+
+Suddenly, a new sound reached her ear,--a small, remote, confidential
+kind of voice, that seemed to arrive from nowhere in particular.
+
+"It's the Captain, hailing us through his megaphone," her companion
+remarked; and, glancing down, far down, in the direction of the
+bridge, Blythe beheld the Captain, looking curiously attenuated in the
+unusual perspective, standing with a gigantic object resembling a
+cornucopia raised to his lips.
+
+"You like it vare you are?" quoth the uncanny voice, not loud, but
+startlingly near.
+
+And Blythe nodded her head and waved her hat in vigorous assent.
+
+The great ship stretched long and narrow astern, the main deck shut in
+with awnings through which the huge smokestacks rose, and the
+wide-mouthed ventilators crooked their necks. Along either outer edge
+of the awnings a line of lifeboats showed, tied fast in their
+high-springing davits, while from the mouth of the yellow
+ship's-funnels black masses of smoke floated slowly and heavily
+astern. The _Lorelei_ swam the water like a wonderful white aquatic
+bird, leaving upon the quiet sea a long snowy track of foam.
+
+On a line with their lofty perch a sailor swung spider-like among the
+network of sheets and halyards that clung about the mainmast, its
+meshes clearly defined against the pure blue of the sky, while below
+there, on the bridge, the big brass nautical instruments gleamed, and
+the caps of the Captain and his lieutenants showed white in the sun.
+As Blythe glanced down and away from this stirring outlook, she could
+just distinguish among the dark figures of the steerage the small
+white face of the child upturned toward the sky; and again a sharp
+pang took her, a feeling that the little creature did not belong
+among those rough men and women. No wonder that the beautiful Italian
+eyes always sought the sky; it was their only refuge from sordid
+sights.
+
+"I suppose the woman meant that the child was her little mistress; did
+she not?" Blythe asked abruptly.
+
+"That was what I understood."
+
+"It's probably a romance; don't you think so?" and Blythe felt that
+she was applying to a high authority for information on such a head.
+
+"Looks like it," the great authority opined. "I think we shall have to
+investigate the case."
+
+"Oh, will you? And you speak Italian so beautifully!"
+
+"How do you know that?"
+
+"Oh, I'm sure of it! It sounds so exactly like the hand-organ men!"
+
+"Look here, Miss Blythe," the poet protested, "you must not flatter a
+modest man like that. My daughter would say you were turning my
+head."
+
+"Oh, I rather think your daughter knows that it's not the kind of head
+to be turned," Blythe answered easily. She was beginning to feel as
+if she had known this famous personage all her life.
+
+"I shall tell her that," said he.
+
+Presently one-bell sounded a faint tinkle far below, and the big
+megaphone inquired whether they wanted to come down, and was assured
+that they did not. And all the while during their voyage through the
+air, which was prolonged for another half-hour, the two good comrades
+were weaving romances about the little girl; and with a curious
+confidence, as if, forsooth, they could conjure up what fortunes they
+would out of that vast horizon toward which the good ship was bearing
+them on.
+
+At last the time came for them to go below, and they reluctantly
+signalled to the sailors, grouped about the deck in patient
+expectation. Upon which the windlass was set going, and slowly and
+creakingly the "crow's nest" was lowered from its airy height.
+
+The two aeronauts found the steerage still populous with queer
+figures, and the atmosphere seemed more unsavoury than ever after
+their sojourn among the upper airs. To their disappointment, however,
+the woman and her Signorina were nowhere to be seen. Blythe and Mr.
+Grey looked for them in every corner of the deck, but no trace of them
+was to be found, and Blythe mounted the gangway to their own deck with
+much of the reluctance which she often felt in submitting to an
+interruption in a serial story.
+
+They found Mrs. Halliday amusing herself with a glass of cracked ice,
+giving casual attention the while to a very long story told by a
+garrulous fellow-passenger in a wadded hood.
+
+"Oh, Mamma," Blythe cried, perching upon the extension foot of her
+mother's chair, "why didn't you and Mr. DeWitt stay longer? And how
+did it happen that nobody else got wind of it? I don't believe a
+single person knows what we've been about! And oh! we have had such a
+glorious time! It was like being a bird! Only that little girl in the
+steerage oughtn't to be there, and Mr. Grey and I are going to see
+what can be done about it, and----"
+
+The wadded hood had fallen silent, and now its wearer rose, with an
+air of resignation, and carried her tale to another listener, while
+Mr. Grey also moved away, leaving Blythe to tell her own story.
+
+They were great friends, Mrs. Halliday and this only child of hers,
+and well they might be; for, as Blythe had informed Mr. Grey early in
+their acquaintance; "Mamma and I are all there are of us."
+
+As she sat beside this best of friends,--having dropped into the chair
+left vacant by the wadded hood,--Blythe lived over again every
+experience and sensation of that eventful afternoon, and with the
+delightful sense of sharing it with somebody who understood. And,
+since the most abiding impression of all had been her solicitude for
+the little steerage passenger, she found no difficulty in arousing her
+mother to an almost equal interest in the child's fate.
+
+And presently, when the cornet player passed them, with the air of
+short-lived importance which comes to a ship's cornet three times a
+day, and, stationing himself well aft, played the cheerful little tune
+which heralds the approaching dinner-hour, Blythe slipped her hand
+into her mother's and said:
+
+"We'll do something about that little girl; won't us, Mumsey?"
+
+Upon which Mrs. Halliday, rising, and patting the rosy cheek which she
+used to call the "apple of her eye," said:
+
+"I shouldn't wonder if us did, Blythe."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE LITTLE SIGNORINA
+
+
+Blythe lay awake a long time that night, thinking, not of the bridge
+nor of the "crow's nest," not of the Captain nor of the supposed Hugh
+Dalton, but of the child in the steerage. How stifling it must be down
+there to-night! It was hot and airless enough here, where Blythe had a
+stateroom to herself,--separated from her mother's by a narrow
+passageway, and where the port-holes had been open all day. Now, to be
+sure, they were closed; for the sea was rising, and already the spray
+dashed against the thick glass. Oh, how must it be in the steerage!
+And how did it happen that that nice woman had been obliged to take
+her little Signorina in such squalid fashion to _la bella Italia_?
+
+Blythe fell asleep with the sound of creaking timbers in her ears, as
+the good ship strained against the rising sea, and when the clear note
+of the cornet, playing the morning hymn, roused her from her dreams,
+the roaring of wind and waves sent her thoughts with a shock of pity
+to the little steerage passenger shut up below. For with such a sea as
+this the waves must be sweeping the lower deck, and there could be no
+release for the poor little prisoner.
+
+"Vhy you not report that veather from the lookout?" the Captain asked
+with mock severity as Blythe appeared at the breakfast table.
+
+The racks were on, and the knives and forks had begun their
+time-honoured minuet within their funny little fences. The amateur
+"lookout" glanced across the table at her friend and ally the poet,
+who nodded encouragingly as she answered:
+
+"Oh, we knew the Captain knew all about it!"
+
+"You think de Capitaen know pretty much eferything, _wie es scheint_!"
+was the reply, uttered in so deep a guttural that Blythe knew the old
+Viking did not take very seriously the "bit of weather" that seemed to
+her so violent. In fact, he owned as much before he had finished his
+second cup of coffee.
+
+Yet when she came up the companionway after breakfast, she found a
+stout rope stretched across the deck from stanchion to stanchion to
+hold on by, the steamer chairs all tied fast to the rail that runs
+around the deckhouse, and every preparation made for rough weather.
+
+It was not what a sailor would have called a storm, but the sea was
+changed enough from the smiling calm of yesterday. Not many passengers
+were on deck, half a dozen, only, reclining in their chairs in the lee
+of the deckhouse, close reefed in their heavy wraps; while here and
+there a pair of indefatigable promenaders lurched and slid along the
+heaving deck arm in arm, or clung to any chance support in a desperate
+effort to keep their footing.
+
+Blythe had to buffet her way lustily as she turned a corner to
+windward. Holding her golf-cape close about her and jamming her felt
+hat well down on her head, she made her way to the narrow passageway
+forward of the wheel-house where one looks down into the steerage. The
+waves were dashing across the deck, which was deserted excepting for
+one or two dark-browed men crouched under shelter of the forecastle.
+
+There was a light, drizzling rain, and now and then the spray struck
+against her face. Blythe looked up at the "crow's nest," which was
+describing strange geometrical figures against the sky. The lookouts
+in their oil-coats did not seem in the least to mind their erratic
+passage through space. She wished it were eight-bells and time for
+them to change watch; it was always such fun to see them running up
+the ladder, hand over hand, their quick, monkey-like figures
+silhouetted against the sky.
+
+How nobly the great ship forged ahead against an angry sea, climbing
+now to the crest of a big wave, and giving a long, shuddering shake
+of determination before plunging down into a black, swirling hollow!
+And how the wind and the waters bellowed together!
+
+The Captain was on the bridge in his rubber coat and sou'-wester. He
+had said this would not last long, and he had stopped for a second cup
+of coffee before leaving the table. All the same, Blythe would not
+have ventured to accost him now, even if he had passed her way.
+
+Presently she returned under shelter of the awning and let Gustav tuck
+her up in her chair to dry off. And Mr. DeWitt came and sat down
+beside her and instructed her in the delectable game of "Buried
+Cities," in which she became speedily so proficient that, taking her
+cue from the lettering on one of the lifeboats, she discovered the
+city of Bremen lying "buried" in "the som_bre men_ace of the sea!"
+
+After a while, Gustav appeared before them, bearing a huge tray of
+_bouillon_ and sandwiches, with which he was striking the most
+eccentric angles; and Blythe discovered that she was preposterously
+hungry. And while her nose was still buried in her cup, she espied
+over its rim a pair of legs planted well apart, in the cause of
+equilibrium, and the big, pleasant voice of Mr. Grey made itself heard
+above wind and sea, saying, "Guess where I've been."
+
+"In the smoking-room," was the prompt reply.
+
+"Guess again."
+
+"On the bridge,--only you wouldn't dare!"
+
+"Once more."
+
+"Oh, I know," Blythe cried, setting her thick cup down on the deck,
+and tumbling off her chair in a snarl of steamer-rugs; "You've been
+down in the steerage finding out about the little Signorina!"
+
+"Who told you?"
+
+"You did! You looked so pleased with yourself! Oh, do tell me all
+about her!"
+
+"Well, I've had a long talk with the woman. Shall we walk up and
+down?"
+
+And off they went, with that absence of ceremony which characterises
+life on shipboard, leaving Mr. DeWitt to bury his cities all unaided
+and unapplauded. Then, as the two walked up and down,--literally up
+and down, for the ship was pitching a bit, and sometimes they were
+labouring up-hill, and sometimes they were running down a steep
+incline,--as they walked up and down Mr. Grey told his story.
+
+The woman, Giuditta, had confided to him all she knew, and he had
+surmised more. Giuditta had known the family only since the time,
+three years ago, when she had been called in to take care of the
+little Cecilia during the illness of the Signora. The father had been
+a handsome good-for-nothing, who had got shot in a street row in
+that quarter of New York known as "Little Italy." He was
+nothing,--_niente_, _niente_;--but the Signora! Oh, if the gentleman
+could but have known the Signora, so beautiful, so patient, so sad!
+Giuditta had stayed with her and shared her fortunes, which were
+all, alas! misfortunes,--and had nursed her through a long
+decline. But never a word had she told of her own origin,--the
+beautiful Signora,--nor had her father's name ever passed her lips.
+Had she known that she was dying, perhaps then, for the child's
+sake, she might have forgotten her pride. But she was always
+thinking she should get well,--and then, one day, she died!
+
+There was very little left,--only a few dollars; but among the squalid
+properties of the pitiful little stage where the poor young thing had
+enacted the last act of her tragedy, was one picture, a _Madonna_,
+with the painter's name, G. Bellini, just decipherable. It was a
+little picture, twelve inches by sixteen, in a dingy old frame, and
+not a pretty picture at that. But a kind man, a dealer in antiquities,
+had given Giuditta one hundred dollars for it. "Think of that,
+Signore! One hundred dollars for an ugly little black picture no
+bigger than that!"
+
+"I suppose," Mr. Grey remarked, as they stood balancing themselves at
+an angle of many degrees,--"I suppose that the picture was
+genuine,--else the man would hardly have paid one hundred dollars for
+it."
+
+"And would it be worth more than that?"
+
+"A trifle," he replied, rather grimly. "Somewhere among the
+thousands."
+
+"But why should they have kept such a picture when they were so poor?
+Why didn't they sell it?"
+
+"That would hardly have occurred to them. It was evidently a family
+heirloom that the girl had taken with her because she loved it. I
+doubt if she guessed its value. A Bellini! A Giovanni Bellini, in a
+New York tenement house! Think of it! And now I suppose some
+millionaire has got it. Likely enough somebody who doesn't know enough
+to buy his own pictures! Horrible idea! Horrible!" and Mr. Grey strode
+along, all but snorting with rage at the thought.
+
+"But tell me more about the little girl," Blythe entreated, wishing
+the wind wouldn't blow her words out of her mouth so rudely. "Her name
+is Cecilia, you say?"
+
+"Yes; Cecilia. Dopo is the name they went by, but the nurse doesn't
+think it genuine. Her idea is that her Signora was the daughter of
+some great family, and got herself disowned by marrying an opera
+singer who subsequently made a fiasco and dropped his name with his
+fame. She doesn't think Dopo ever was a family name. It means 'after,'
+you know, and they may have adopted it for its ironical
+significance."
+
+"And the poor lady died and never told!" Blythe panted, as they toiled
+painfully up-hill with the rain beating in their faces.
+
+"Yes, and--look out! hold tight!" for suddenly the slant of the deck
+was reversed, and they came coasting down to an impromptu seat on a
+bench.
+
+"It seems," Mr. Grey went on, when they had resumed their somewhat
+arduous promenade,--"it seems the woman, Giuditta, is quite alone in
+the world and has been longing to get back to Italy. So she easily
+persuaded herself that she could find the child's family and establish
+her in high life. Giuditta has an uncommonly high idea of high life,"
+he added. "I think she imagines that somebody in a court train and a
+coronet will come to meet her Signorina at the pier in Genoa. Poor
+things! There'll be a rude awakening!"
+
+"But we won't let it be rude!" Blythe protested. "We must do something
+about it. Can't you think of anything to do?"
+
+They were standing now, clinging to the friendly rope stretched across
+the deck, shoulder high.
+
+"Giuditta's plan," Mr. Grey replied, "is the naive one of appealing to
+the Queen about it. And, seriously, I think it may be worth while to
+ask the American Minister to make inquiries. For there is, of course,
+a bare chance that the family may be known at Court. In the
+meantime----"
+
+"In the meantime," Blythe interposed, "we've got to get her out of the
+steerage!"
+
+"But how?"
+
+"Oh, Mamma will arrange that. We'll just make a cabin passenger of
+her, and I can take her in with me in my stateroom. Oh! how happy she
+will be, lying in my steamer chair, with that dear Gustav to wait on
+her! I must go down at once and get Mamma to say yes!"
+
+"And you think she will?"
+
+"I know she will! She is always doing nice things. If you really knew
+her you wouldn't doubt it!" And with that the young optimist vanished
+in her accustomed whirl of golf-cape.
+
+If faith can move mountains, it is perhaps no wonder that the implicit
+and energetic faith of which Blythe Halliday was possessed proved
+equal to the removal of a small child from one quarter to another of
+the big ship. The three persons concerned in bringing about the change
+were easily won over; for Mrs. Halliday was quite of Blythe's mind in
+the matter, Mr. Grey had little difficulty in bringing the Captain to
+their point of view, while, as for Giuditta, she hailed the event as
+the first step in the transformation of her small Signorina into the
+little "great lady" she was born to be.
+
+Accordingly, close upon luncheon time, when the sun was just breaking
+through the clouds, and the sea, true to the Captain's prediction, was
+already beginning to subside, the tiny Signorina was carried, in the
+strong arms of Gustav, up the steep gangway by the wheel-house, where
+Blythe and her mother, Mr. DeWitt and the poet, to say nothing of
+Captain Seemann himself, formed an impromptu reception committee for
+her little ladyship.
+
+As the child was set on her feet at the head of the gangway, she
+turned to throw a kiss down upon her faithful Giuditta, and then,
+without the slightest hesitation, she placed her hand in Blythe's, and
+walked away with her.
+
+That evening there was a dance on board the _Lorelei_; for it had been
+but the fringe of a storm which they had crossed, and the sea was
+again taking on its long, easy swell.
+
+The deck presented a festal appearance for the occasion. Rows of
+Japanese lanterns were strung from side to side against the white
+background of awning and deckhouse, and the flags of many nations
+lent their gay colours to the pretty scene. The ship's orchestra was
+in its element, playing with a "go" and rhythm which seemed caught
+from the pulsing movement of the ship itself.
+
+As Blythe, with Mr. DeWitt, who had been a famous dancer in his day,
+led off the Virginia Reel, she wondered how it would strike the
+sailors of a passing brig,--this gay apparition of light and music,
+riding the great, dark, solemn sea.
+
+The dance itself was rather a staid, middle-aged affair, for Blythe
+was the only young girl on board, and none but the youngest or the
+surest-footed could put much spirit into a dance where the law of
+gravitation was apparently changing base from moment to moment. Blythe
+and her partner, however, took little account of the moving floor
+beneath their feet, or the hesitating demeanour of their companions.
+One after another, even the most reluctant and self-distrustful of the
+revellers found themselves caught up into active participation in the
+figure.
+
+In a quiet corner of the deck sat Mrs. Halliday, with little Cecilia
+beside her, snugly stowed away in a nest of steamer-rugs; for they
+could not bear to take her below, out of the fresh, invigorating air.
+Their little guest spoke hardly any English, but, although Mrs.
+Halliday was under the impression that she herself spoke Italian, the
+child seemed more conversable in Blythe's company than in that of any
+one else, not excepting Mr. Grey, about whose linguistic
+accomplishments there could be no question.
+
+Accordingly when, the Virginia Reel being finished, Blythe came and
+sat on the foot of the little girl's chair, they fell into an animated
+conversation, each in her own tongue. And presently, during a pause in
+the music, the Italian Count chanced to pass their way, and, stopping
+in his solitary promenade, appeared to give ear to their talk.
+
+Suddenly he stooped, and, looking into the animated face of the child,
+inquired in his own tongue; "What is thy name, little one?"
+
+But when the pure, liquid, childish voice answered "Cecilia Dopo," he
+merely lifted his hat and, bowing ceremoniously, passed on.
+
+Mr. Grey, who had watched the little scene from a distance, joined the
+group a moment later and, taking a vacant chair beside Mrs. Halliday,
+remarked:
+
+"I think we shall have to cultivate the old gentleman. He might be
+induced to lend a hand in behalf of this young person. They are both
+Florentines," he added, thoughtfully, "and Florentine society is not
+large."
+
+"Then you really believe the nurse is right about the child?" Mrs.
+Halliday asked.
+
+"Oh, I shouldn't dare say that the mother was a great lady," he
+returned; "but there is certainly something high-bred about the little
+thing."
+
+"They often have that air," Mrs. Halliday demurred,--"even the beggar
+children."
+
+"Yes; to our eyes. But, do you know, I rather think the Italians
+themselves can tell the difference. I would rather trust Giuditta's
+judgment than my own. Besides," he added, after a long pause, during
+which he had been watching the expressive face of the child.
+"Besides,--there's that Giovanni Bellini. That sort of thing doesn't
+often stray into low society."
+
+At this juncture the tall Italian moved again into their
+neighbourhood, and stood, at a point where the awning had been drawn
+back, gazing, with a preoccupied air, out to sea.
+
+Rising from his seat, Mr. Grey approached him, remarking abruptly, and
+with a jerk of the head toward Cecilia, "Florentine, is she not?"
+
+"_Sicuro_," was the grave reply; upon which the Count moved away, to
+be seen no more that evening.
+
+As the Englishman rejoined them after this laconic interview, Blythe
+greeted him with a new theory.
+
+"Do you know," she said, "I used to think the Count was haughty and
+disagreeable, but I have changed my mind."
+
+"That only shows how susceptible you good Republicans are to any sign
+of attention from the nobility," was the teasing reply.
+
+"Perhaps you are right," Blythe returned, with the fair-mindedness
+which distinguished her. "You know I never saw a titled person before,
+excepting one red-headed English Lord, who hadn't any manners. I've
+often thought I should like, of all things, to know a King or Queen
+really well!"
+
+"You don't say so!" Mr. Grey laughed. "And what's your opinion now, of
+the old gentleman, since he deigned to interrupt your conversation?"
+
+"I believe he is unhappy."
+
+"What makes you think so?"
+
+"There's an unhappy look away back in his eyes. I never looked in
+before,--and then----"
+
+"And then----?"
+
+"There's something about his voice."
+
+"Yes; Tuscan, you know."
+
+"Oh, is that it? Well, any way, I like him!"
+
+"If that's the case, perhaps you could make better headway with him
+than I."
+
+"But I don't speak Italian."
+
+"Perhaps you speak French."
+
+"I know my conjugations," was the modest admission.
+
+"And I'm sure he would be enchanted to hear them," Mr. Grey laughed,
+as the orchestra struck into the familiar music of the Lancers,
+causing him to beat a retreat into the smoking-room.
+
+And while Blythe danced gaily and heartily with a boy somewhat younger
+than herself, and not quite as tall, her little protegee fell into a
+deep sleep. And presently, the dance being over, the faithful Gustav
+carried her down to Blythe's stateroom, where she was snugly tucked
+away in the gently rocking cradle of the lower berth.
+
+As for Blythe, thus relegated to the upper berth, she entered promptly
+into an agreeable dreamland, where she found herself speaking Italian
+fluently, and where she discovered, to her extreme satisfaction, that
+the Queen of Italy was her bosom friend!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+A NEW DAWN
+
+
+It was pretty to see the little Signorina revive under the favouring
+influences of prosperity; and indeed the soft airs of the southern
+seas were never sweeter nor more caressing than those which came to
+console our voyagers for their short-lived storm.
+
+Life was full of interest and excitement for the little girl. The
+heavy lassitude of her steerage days had fallen from her, and already
+that first morning a delicate glow of returning vigour touched the
+little cheek.
+
+"She's picking up, isn't she?" Mr. DeWitt remarked, as he joined
+Blythe and the child at the head of the steerage gangway, where the
+little one was throwing enthusiastic kisses and musical Italian
+phrases down upon the hardly less radiant Giuditta.
+
+"Oh, yes!" was the confident reply. "She's a different child since her
+saltwater bath and her big bowl of oatmeal. Mamma says she really has
+a splendid physique, only she was smothering down there in the
+steerage."
+
+Then Mr. DeWitt stooped and, lifting the child, set her on the
+railing, where she could get a better view of her faithful friend
+below.
+
+"There! How do you like that?" he inquired.
+
+Upon which the little girl, finding herself unexpectedly on a level
+with Blythe's face, put up her tiny hand and stroked her cheek.
+
+"Like-a Signorina," she remarked with apparent irrelevance.
+
+"Oh! You do, do you? Well, she's a nice girl."
+
+"Nice-a girl-a," the child repeated, adding a vowel, Italian fashion,
+to each word.
+
+Then, with an appreciative look into the pleasant, whiskered
+countenance, whose owner was holding her so securely on her
+precarious perch, she pressed her little hand gently against his
+waistcoat, and gravely remarked, "Nice-a girl-a, _anche il Signore_!"
+
+"So! I'm a nice girl too, am I?" the old gentleman replied, much
+elated with the compliment.
+
+And Giuditta, down below, perceiving that her Signorina was making new
+conquests, snatched her bright handkerchief from her head, and waved
+it gaily; whereupon a score of the steerage passengers, seized with
+her enthusiasm, waved their hats and handkerchiefs and shouted;
+"_Buon' viaggio, Signorina! Buon' viaggio_!"
+
+And the little recipient of this ovation became so excited that she
+almost jumped out of the detaining arms of Mr. DeWitt, who, being of a
+cautious disposition, made haste to set her down again; upon which
+they all walked aft, under the big awning.
+
+"She makes friends easily," Mr. Grey remarked, later in the morning,
+as he and Blythe paused a moment in their game of ring-toss. The
+child was standing, clinging to the hand of a tall woman in black, a
+grave, silent Southerner who had hitherto kept quite to herself.
+
+"Yes," Blythe rejoined, "but she is fastidious. She will listen to no
+blandishments from any one whom she doesn't take a fancy to. That
+good-natured, talkative Mr. Distel has been trying all day to get her
+to come to him, but she always gives him the slip." And Blythe, in her
+preoccupation, proceeded to throw two rings out of three wide of the
+mark.
+
+"Has the Count taken any more notice of her?" Mr. Grey inquired,
+deftly tossing the smallest of all the rings over the top of the
+post.
+
+"Apparently not; but she takes a great deal of notice of him. See,
+she's watching him now. I should not be a bit surprised if she were to
+speak to him of her own accord one of these days."
+
+"There are not many days left," her companion remarked. "The Captain
+says we shall make Cape St. Vincent before night."
+
+"Oh, how fast the voyage is going!" Blythe sighed.
+
+Yet, sorry as she would be to have the voyage over, no one was more
+enchanted than Blythe when Cape St. Vincent rose out of the sea,
+marking the end of the Atlantic passage. It was just at sundown, and
+the beautiful headland, bathed in a golden light, stood, like the
+mystic battlements of a veritable "Castle in Spain," against a
+luminous sky.
+
+"Mamma," Blythe asked, "did you ever see anything more beautiful than
+that?"
+
+They were standing at the port railing, with the little girl between
+them, watching the great cliffs across the deep blue sea.
+
+"Nothing more beautiful than that seen through your eyes, Blythe."
+
+"I believe you do see it through my eyes, Mumsey," Blythe answered,
+thoughtfully, "just as I am getting to see things through Cecilia's
+eyes. I never realised before how things open up when you look at them
+that way."
+
+And Mrs. Halliday smiled a quiet, inward smile that Blythe understood
+with a new understanding.
+
+They took little Cecilia ashore with them at Gibraltar the next
+morning, and again Blythe experienced the truth of her new theory.
+
+It was our heroine's first glimpse of Europe, and no delectable detail
+of their hour's drive, no exotic bloom, no strange Moorish costume, no
+enchanting vista of cliff or sea, was lost upon her. Yet she felt that
+even her enthusiasm paled before the deep, speechless ecstasy of the
+little Cecilia. It was as if, in the tropical glow and fragrant
+warmth, the child were breathing her native air,--as if she had come
+to her own.
+
+On their return, as the grimy old tug which had carried them across
+the harbour came alongside the big steamer, the child suddenly
+exclaimed, "_Ecco, il Signore!_" and, following the direction of her
+gesture, their eyes met those of the Count looking down upon them. He
+instantly moved away, and they had soon forgotten him, in the
+pleasurable excitement of bestowing upon Giuditta the huge, hat-shaped
+basket filled with fruit which they had brought for her.
+
+Later in the day, as they weighed anchor and sailed out from the
+shadow of the great Rock, Blythe found herself standing with Mr. Grey
+at the stern-rail of their own deck, watching the face of the mighty
+cliff as it changed with the varying perspective.
+
+"Oh! I wish I were a poet or an artist or something!" she cried.
+
+"Would you take that monstrous fortress for a subject?" he asked.
+
+"Yes, and I should do something so splendid with it that nobody would
+dare to be satirical!" and she glanced defiantly at her companion,
+whose good-humoured countenance was wrinkling with amusement.
+
+"Let us see," he said. "How would this do?" And he gravely repeated
+the following:
+
+                "There once was a fortress named Gib,
+                Whose manners were haughty and--
+
+What rhymes with Gib?"
+
+"Glib!" Blythe cried.
+
+"Good!
+
+                 Whose manners were haughty and glib.
+                           If you tried to get in,
+                           She replied with a grin,--
+
+Quick! Give me another rhyme for Gib."
+
+"Rib!" Blythe suggested, audaciously.
+
+"Excellent, excellent! Rib! Now, how does it go?
+
+                There once was a fortress named Gib,
+                Whose manners were haughty and glib!
+                          If you tried to get in,
+                          She replied, with a grin,
+                'I'm Great Britain's impregnable rib!'
+
+Rather neat! Don't you think?"
+
+"O Mr. Grey!" Blythe cried. "You've got to write that in my
+voyage-book! It's the----"
+
+At that moment, a gesture from her companion caused her to turn and
+look behind her. There, only a few feet from where they were standing,
+but with his back to them, was the Count, sitting on one of the long,
+stationary benches fastened against the hatchway, while just at his
+knees stood little Cecilia. She was balancing herself with some
+difficulty on the gently swaying deck, holding out for his acceptance
+a small bunch of violets, which one of the market-women at Gibraltar
+had bestowed upon her.
+
+As he appeared to hesitate: "_Prendili!_" she cried, with pretty
+wilfulness. Upon which he took the little offering, and lifted it to
+his face.
+
+The child stood her ground resolutely, and presently, "Put me up!" she
+commanded, still in her own sweet tongue.
+
+Obediently he lifted her, and placed her beside him on the seat, where
+she sat clinging with one little hand to the sleeve of his coat to
+keep from slipping down, with the gentle dip of the vessel.
+
+The two sat, for a few minutes, quite silent, gazing off toward the
+African coast, and Blythe and her companion drew nearer, filled with
+curiosity as to the outcome of the interview.
+
+Presently the child looked up into the Count's face and inquired, with
+the pretty Tuscan accent which sounded like an echo of his own
+question on the evening of the dance:
+
+"What is thy name?"
+
+"Giovanni Battista Allamiraviglia."
+
+Cecilia repeated after him the long, musical name, without missing a
+syllable, and with a certain approving inflection which evidently had
+an ingratiating effect upon the many-syllabled aristocrat; for he
+lifted his carefully gloved hand and passed it gently over the little
+head.
+
+The child took the caress very naturally, and when, presently, the
+hand returned to the knee, she got possession of it, and began
+crossing the kid fingers one over the other, quite undisturbed by the
+fact that they invariably fell apart again as soon as she loosed her
+hold.
+
+At this juncture the two eavesdroppers moved discreetly away, and
+Blythe, leaving her fellow-conspirator far behind, flew to her
+mother's side, crying:
+
+"O Mumsey! She's simply winding him round her finger, and there's
+nothing he won't be ready to do for us now!"
+
+"Yes, dear; I'm delighted to hear it," Mrs. Halliday replied, with
+what Blythe was wont to call her "benignant and amused" expression.
+"And after a while you will tell me what you are talking about!"
+
+But Blythe, nothing daunted, only appealed to Mr. Grey, who had just
+caught up with her.
+
+"You agree with me, Mr. Grey; don't you?" she insisted.
+
+"Perfectly, and in every particular. Mrs. Halliday, your daughter and
+I have been eavesdropping, and we have come to confess."
+
+Whereupon Blythe dropped upon the foot of her mother's chair, Mr. Grey
+established himself in the chair adjoining, and they gave their
+somewhat bewildered auditor the benefit of a few facts.
+
+"I really believe," the Englishman remarked, in conclusion,--"I really
+believe that haughty old dago can help us if anybody can. And when
+your engaging young protegee has completed her conquest,--to-morrow,
+it may be, or the day after, for she's making quick work of
+it,--we'll see what can be done with him."
+
+And, after all, what could have been more natural than the attraction
+which, from that time forth, manifested itself between the Count and
+his small countrywoman? If the little girl, in making her very marked
+advances, had been governed by the unwavering instinct which always
+guided her choice of companions, the old man, for his part, could not
+but find refreshment, after his long, solitary voyage, in the pretty
+Tuscan prattle of the child. Most Italians love children, and the
+Count Giovanni Battista Allamiraviglia appeared to be no exception to
+his race.
+
+The two would sit together by the hour, absorbed, neither in the
+lovely sights of this wonderful Mediterranean voyage, nor in the
+movements of those about them, but simply and solely in one another.
+
+"She's telling her own story better than we could do," Mr. Grey used
+to say.
+
+It was now no unusual thing to see the child established on the old
+gentleman's knee, and once Blythe found her fast asleep in his arms.
+But it was not until the very last day of the voyage that the most
+wonderful thing of all occurred.
+
+The sea was smooth as a lake, and all day they had been sailing the
+length of the Riviera. All day people had been giving names to the
+gleaming white points on the distant, dreamy shore,--Nice, Mentone,
+San Remo,--names fragrant with association even to the mind of the
+young traveller, who knew them only from books and letters.
+
+Blythe and the little girl were sitting, somewhat apart from the
+others, on the long bench by the hatchway where Cecilia had first laid
+siege to the Count's affections, and Blythe was allowing the child to
+look through the large end of her field-glass,--a source of endless
+entertainment to them both. Suddenly Cecilia gave a little shriek of
+delight at the way her good friend, Mr. Grey, dwindled into a pigmy;
+upon which the Count, attracted apparently by her voice, left his
+chair and came and sat down beside them.
+
+As he lifted his hat, with a polite "_Permetta, Signorina_," Blythe
+noticed, for the first time on the whole voyage, that he was without
+his gloves. Perhaps the general humanising of his attitude, through
+intercourse with the child, had caused him to relax this little point
+of punctilio.
+
+Cecilia, meanwhile, had promptly climbed upon his knee, and now,
+laying hold of one of the ungloved hands, she began twisting a large
+seal ring which presented itself to her mind as a pleasing novelty.
+Presently her attention seemed arrested by the device of the seal, and
+she murmured softly, "_Fideliter_."
+
+Blythe might not have distinguished the word as being Latin rather
+than Italian, had she not been struck by the change of countenance in
+the wearer of the ring. He turned to her abruptly, and asked, in
+French:
+
+"Does she read?"
+
+"No," Blythe answered, thankful that she was not obliged to muster her
+"conjugations" for the emergency!
+
+There was a swift interchange of question and answer between the old
+man and the child, of which Blythe understood but little. She heard
+Cecilia say "Mamma," in answer to an imperative question; the words
+"_orologio_" and "_perduto_" were intelligible to her. She was sure
+that the crest and motto formed the subject of discussion, and it was
+distinctly borne in upon her that the same device--a mailed hand and
+arm with the word _Fideliter_ beneath it--had been engraved on a lost
+watch which had belonged to the child's mother. But it was all surmise
+on her part, and she could hardly refrain from shouting aloud to Mr.
+Grey, standing over there, in dense unconsciousness, to come quickly
+and interpret this exasperating tongue, which sounded so pretty, and
+eluded her understanding so hopelessly.
+
+The mind of the Count seemed to be turning in the same direction, for,
+after a little, he arose abruptly, and, setting the child down beside
+Blythe, walked straight across the deck to the Englishman, whom he
+accosted so unceremoniously that Blythe's sense of wonders unfolding
+was but confirmed.
+
+The two men turned and walked away to a more secluded part of the
+deck, where they remained, deep in conversation, for what seemed to
+Blythe a long, long time. She felt as if she must not leave her seat,
+lest she miss the thread of the plot,--for a plot it surely was, with
+its unravelling close at hand.
+
+At last she saw the two men striding forward in the direction of the
+steerage, and with a conspicuous absence of that aimlessness which
+marks the usual promenade at sea.
+
+The little girl was again amusing herself with the glasses, and, as
+the two arbiters of her destiny passed her line of vision, she laughed
+aloud at their swiftly diminishing forms. Impelled by a curious
+feeling that the child must take some serious part in this crucial
+moment of her destiny, Blythe quietly took the glasses from her and
+said, as she had done each night when she put her little charge to
+bed:
+
+"Will you say a little prayer, Cecilia?"
+
+And the child, wondering, yet perfectly docile, pulled out the little
+mother-of-pearl rosary that she always wore under her dress, and
+reverently murmured one of the prayers her mother had taught her.
+After which, as if beguiled by the association of ideas into thinking
+it bedtime, she curled herself up on the bench, and, with her head in
+Blythe's lap, fell fast asleep.
+
+And Blythe sat, lost in thought, absently stroking the little head,
+until suddenly Mr. Grey appeared before her.
+
+"You have been outrageously treated, Miss Blythe," he declared,
+seating himself beside her, "but I had to let the old fellow have his
+head."
+
+"Oh, don't tell me anything, till we find Mamma," Blythe cried. "It's
+all her doing, you know,--letting me have Cecilia up here," and,
+gently rousing the sleeper, she said, "Come, Cecilia. We are going to
+find the Signora."
+
+"And you consider it absolutely certain?" Mrs. Halliday asked, when
+Mr. Grey had finished his tale. She was far more surprised than
+Blythe, for she had had a longer experience of life, to teach her a
+distrust in fairy-stories.
+
+"There does not seem a doubt. The child's familiarity with the crest
+was striking enough, but that Bellini _Madonna_ clinches it. And then,
+Giuditta's description of both father and mother seems to be
+unmistakable."
+
+"Oh! To think of his finding the child that he had never heard of,
+just as he had given up the search for her mother!" Blythe exclaimed.
+
+Cecilia was again playing happily with the glasses, paying no heed to
+her companions.
+
+"The strangest thing of all to me," Mrs. Halliday declared, "is his
+relenting toward his daughter after all these years."
+
+"You must not forget that Fate had been pounding him pretty hard," Mr.
+Grey interposed. "When a man loses in one year two of his children,
+and the only grandchild he knows anything about, it's not surprising
+that he should soften a bit toward the only child he has left."
+
+They were still discussing this wonderful subject, when, half an hour
+later, the tall figure of the Count emerged from the companionway. As
+he bent his steps toward the other side of the deck he was visible
+only to the child, who stood facing the rest of the group. She
+promptly dropped the glasses upon Blythe's knee, and crying, "_Il
+Signore!_" ran and took hold of his hand; whereupon the two walked
+away together and were not seen for a long, long time.
+
+Then Blythe and Mr. Grey went up on the bridge and told the Captain.
+No one else was to know--not even Mr. DeWitt--until after they had
+landed, but the Captain was certainly entitled to their confidence.
+
+"For," Blythe said, "you know, Captain Seemann, it never would have
+happened if you had not sent us up in the crow's nest that day."
+
+Upon which the Captain, beaming his brightest, and letting his cigar
+go out in the damp breeze for the sake of making his little speech,
+declared:
+
+"I know one thing! It would neffer haf happen at all, if I had sent
+anybody else up in the crow's nest but just Miss Blythe Halliday with
+her bright eyes and her kind heart!"
+
+And Blythe was so overpowered by this tremendous compliment from the
+Captain of the _Lorelei_ that she had not a word to say for herself.
+
+That evening Mr. Grey inscribed his nonsense-verse in Blythe's book;
+and not that only, for to those classic lines he added the following:
+
+"The above was composed in collaboration with his esteemed
+fellow-passenger, Miss Blythe Halliday, by Hugh Dalton, _alias_ 'Mr.
+Grey.'"
+
+It was, of course, a great distinction to own such an autograph as
+that; yet somehow the kind, witty Mr. Grey had been so delightful just
+as he was, that Blythe hardly felt as if the famous name added so very
+much to her satisfaction in his acquaintance.
+
+"I knew it all the time," she declared, quietly; "but it didn't make
+any difference."
+
+"That's worth hearing," said Hugh Dalton.
+
+                  *       *       *       *       *
+
+They parted from the little Cecilia at sunrise, but with promises on
+both sides of a speedy meeting among the hills of Tuscany.
+
+The old Count, with the child's hand clasped in his, paused as he
+reached the gangway, at the foot of which the triumphant Giuditta was
+awaiting them, and pointed toward the rosy east which was flushing the
+beautiful bay a deep crimson.
+
+"Signorina," he said in his careful French, made more careful by his
+effort to control his voice,--"Signorina, it is to you that I owe a
+new dawn,--to you and to your honoured mother."
+
+Then, as Mr. DeWitt and Mr. Grey approached, to tell them that
+everything was in readiness for them to land, Blythe turned, with the
+light of the sunrise in her face, and said, under her breath, so that
+only her mother could hear:
+
+"O Mumsey! How beautiful the world is, with you and me right in the
+very middle of it!"
+
+
+
+
+ARTFUL MADGE
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE PRIZE CONTEST
+
+
+"Artful Madge" was the very flippant name by which Madge Burtwell's
+brother Ned had persisted in calling her from the time when, at the
+age of sixteen, she gained reluctant permission to become a student at
+the Art School.
+
+"Not that we have any objection to art," Mrs. Burtwell was wont to
+explain in a deprecatory tone; "only we should have preferred to have
+Madge graduate first, before devoting herself to a mere
+accomplishment. It seems a little like putting the trimming on a dress
+before sewing the seams up," she would add; "I did it once when I was
+a girl, and the dress always had a queer look."
+
+But Mrs. Burtwell, though firm in her own opinions, was something of
+a philosopher in her attitude toward the contrary-minded, and even
+where her own children were concerned she never allowed her influence
+to degenerate into tyranny. When she found Madge, at the age of
+sixteen, more eager than ever before to study art, and nothing else,
+she told her husband that they might as well make up their minds to
+it, and, at the word, their minds were made up. For Mr. Burtwell was
+the one entirely and unreasoningly tractable member of Mrs. Burtwell's
+flock; in explanation of which fact he was careful to point out that
+only a mature mind could appreciate the true worth of Mrs. Burtwell's
+judgment.
+
+The Burtwells were people of small means and of correspondingly modest
+requirements. They lived in an unfashionable quarter of the city, kept
+a maid-of-all-work, sent their children to the public schools, and got
+their books from the Public Library. Having no expensive tastes, they
+regarded themselves as well-to-do and envied no one.
+
+If Madge Burtwell's eyes had been a whit less clear, or her nature a
+thought less guileless, Ned would not have been so enchanted with his
+new name for her. Indeed, a few years ago she had been described by an
+only half-appreciative friend as "a splendid girl without a mite of
+tact," and if she had succeeded in somewhat softening the asperity of
+her natural frankness, there was enough of it left to lend a delicate
+shade of humour to the name.
+
+Artful Madge, then, was a student at the Art School, and a very
+promising one at that. At the end of three years she had made such
+good progress that she was promoted to painting in the Portrait Class,
+and since her special friend and crony, Eleanor Merritt, was also a
+member of that class, Madge considered her cup of happiness full. Not
+that there were not visions in plenty of still better things to come,
+but they seemed so far in the future that they hardly took on any
+relation with the actual present. Madge and Eleanor dreamed of Europe,
+of the old masters and of the great Paris studios, but it is a
+question whether the fulfillment of any dream could have made them
+happier than they were to-day. Certain it is, that, as they stood side
+by side in the great barren studio, clad in their much-bedaubed,
+long-sleeved aprons, and working away at a portrait head, they had
+little thought for anything but the task in hand. The one vital matter
+for the moment was the mixing and applying of their colours, and, in
+their eagerness to reproduce the exact contour of a cheek, or the
+precise shadow of an unbeautiful nose, they would hardly have
+transferred their attention from the most ill-favoured model to the
+last and greatest Whistler masterpiece.
+
+The girls at the Art School had got hold of Ned's name for his sister
+and adopted it with enthusiasm.
+
+"If you want to know the truth, ask Artful Madge," was a very common
+saying among them.
+
+"Artful Madge says it's a good likeness, anyhow!" modest little Minnie
+Drayton would maintain, when hard pressed by the teasing of the older
+girls.
+
+The incongruity of the name seemed somehow to throw into brighter
+relief the peculiar sincerity of its bearer's character, and by the
+time it was generally adopted among the students Madge Burtwell's
+popularity was established.
+
+It was well that Madge was a favourite, for in certain respects she
+was the worst sinner in the class. To begin with, her palette was the
+very largest in the room, and the most plentifully besmeared with
+colours, and woe to the girl who ventured too near it! As Madge stood
+before her easel, tall and fair and earnest, painting with an ardour
+and concentration which was all too sure to beguile her into her
+besetting sin of "exaggerating details," she wielded both brush- and
+palette-arm with a genial disregard of consequences. Nor could one
+count upon her confining her activities to one location. Like all the
+students, she was in the habit of backing away from her natural
+anchorage from time to time, the better to judge of her work, and not
+one of them all had such a fatal tendency to come up against an
+unoffending easel in the rear, sending canvas and paint-tubes rattling
+upon the floor.
+
+Instantly she would drop upon her knees, overcome with contrition, and
+help collect the scattered treasures, giving many a jar or joggle to
+neighbouring easels in the process.
+
+"It's a shame, Miss Folsom!" she would cry, struggling to her feet
+again, still clutching her beloved palette, which seemed fairly to
+rain colours on every surrounding object. "It's a shame! But if you
+will just cast your eye upon that thing of mine, you will perceive
+that it was the recklessness of desperation. Look at it! There's not a
+value in it!"
+
+Artful Madge was always forgiven, and no one ever thought of calling
+her awkward, and when, in the early autumn, a Saturday sketching club
+was organised, it was christened "The Artful Daubers" in honor of
+Madge, and she was unanimously elected president.
+
+The girls were not in the habit of paying much attention to chance
+visitors who came in from time to time and made the perilous passage
+among the easels, and lucky was the "parent" or "art-patron" who
+escaped without a streak of colour on some portion of his raiment.
+When Mrs. Oliver Jacques looked in upon them one memorable morning in
+February no premonition of great things to come stirred the company;
+only indifferent glances were directed upon her by the few who deigned
+to observe her at all. And this pleased Mrs. Oliver Jacques very much
+indeed.
+
+Yet, if the girls had paused to consider,--a thing which they never
+did when there was a model on the platform,--they would have been
+aware that their visitor was a person of importance in the world of
+Art, for importance in no other world would have secured to her the
+personal escort of Mr. Salome, the adored teacher of their class. Yet
+Mrs. Jacques was a charming little old lady who would have commanded
+attention on her own merits in any less preoccupied assembly than
+that of the studio. Her exceedingly bright eyes and her exceedingly
+white hair seemed to accentuate her animation of manner; there was so
+much sparkle in her face that even her silence did not lack point.
+
+She had accomplished her tortuous passage among the easels without
+meeting with any mishaps in the shape of Cremnitz-white or
+crimson-lake. She had paused occasionally and had bestowed a critical
+nod upon the one "blocked-in" countenance, or had drawn her brows
+together questioningly over a study in which the nose had a
+startlingly finished appearance in a still sketchy environment, but
+not until she had successfully avoided the last easel, planted at an
+erratic angle just where the unwary would be sure to stub his toe, did
+she make any remark.
+
+"A lot of them, aren't there?" she observed.
+
+"Yes, the school is pretty full," Mr. Salome replied. "In fact, we're
+a little bothered for room."
+
+"Any imagination among them?"
+
+"Well, as to that, it's rather early to form an opinion. Our aim just
+now is to keep them to facts. Some of them," the artist added with a
+smile, "are rather too much inclined to draw upon their imagination.
+Now there is one girl there who is, humanly speaking, certain to paint
+the model's hair jet-black, or as black as paint can be made. And yet,
+you see, there is not a black thread in it."
+
+"I wonder whether you would object to my making an experiment?" Mrs.
+Jacques asked, abruptly.
+
+And from that seemingly unpremeditated question of Mrs. Jacques', and
+from the consultation that ensued, grew the Prize Contest, destined to
+be famous in the annals of the school.
+
+When, on that very afternoon, the students were assembled for the
+occasion, they had not yet had time to adjust their minds to the
+magnitude of the interests involved. Yet the conditions were simple
+enough. That student who should, in the space of two hours, produce
+the best composition illustrative of "Hope" was to receive a prize of
+five hundred dollars! The conviction prevailed among them that the
+vivacious little old lady with the white hair could be none other than
+the fairy godmother of nursery lore, and it was only too delightful to
+find that agile and beneficent myth interesting herself in the cause
+of Art.
+
+When once the class was fairly launched upon its new emprise, a change
+in the usual aspect of things became apparent. In the first place,
+most of the students were seated; for, in a task of pure composition,
+there was no occasion either for standing or for "prowling,"--the term
+familiarly applied to the sometimes disastrous backward and forward
+movements of which mention has been made, and which ordinarily gave so
+much action to the scene. Furthermore, the use of watercolor, as
+lending itself more readily than oils to rapid execution, deprived the
+scene of one of its most picturesque features,--namely, the
+brilliant-hued palette which, with its similarity to a shield, was
+wont to lend its bearer an Amazonian air, not lost upon the class
+caricaturists. Subdued, however, and almost "lady-like" as the
+appearance of the class had become, hardly half an hour had passed
+before the genial spirit of creation had so taken possession of the
+assembly as to cast a glow and glamour of its own upon it. Here and
+there, to be sure, might still be seen an anxious, intent young face
+with eyes fixed upon vacancy, or an idle, if somewhat begrimed and
+parti-coloured hand, fiercely clutching a dejected head; but nearly
+all were already busily at work, eagerly painting, or as eagerly
+obliterating strokes too hastily made. The subject, hackneyed as it
+certainly is, had pleased and stimulated the girls. There was a
+mingled vagueness and familiarity in its suggestion which puzzled them
+and spurred them on at the same time.
+
+Among the most impetuous workers, almost from the outset, was Artful
+Madge. She had instantly conceived of Hope as a vague, beckoning
+figure, which was to take its significance from the multitude and
+variety of its followers. She chose a large sheet of paper and
+quickly sketched in the upper left-hand corner a very indefinite hint
+of a winged, luminous something,--it might have been an angel or a
+bird or a cloud, seen from a great distance, against a somewhat
+threatening sky. Without defining the form at all she very cleverly
+produced an impression of receding motion;--she ventured even to hope
+that there was something alluring in the motion. That, however, must
+be made unmistakably clear through the pursuing figures with which she
+proposed to fill the foreground.
+
+She glanced at Eleanor, who had not yet mixed a colour.
+
+"What are you waiting for?" she asked.
+
+"I don't seem ready to begin," said Eleanor, in an absent tone of
+voice.
+
+"Have you got an idea?"
+
+"I think so."
+
+"Then do hurry up and go ahead, or you'll get left."
+
+Madge sat a moment, looking straight before her.
+
+"What are you going to put in there?" asked Eleanor.
+
+"What I want is all the people in the world," Madge replied, with
+perfect gravity. "But there is not room for them."
+
+A moment later she was working furiously, with hot cheeks and shining
+eyes and breath coming faster and faster.
+
+First she would have a soldier. Madge had always loved a soldier; her
+father had been one in the great and splendid days before she was
+born. Yes, a soldier must come first. And forthwith a very sketchy
+warrior stepped, with a very martial air, upon the paper. Then an
+artist ought to come next;--only she could not think of any way of
+indicating his calling without the aid of some conventional emblem. A
+mere look of inspiration might belong to a poet or a preacher as well
+as to an artist. Besides which, she was by no means sure that she knew
+how to paint a look of inspiration. And then it came to her that,
+unless she could paint just that, her picture must be a failure; and
+so she fell upon it, and began sketching in figures of old and young,
+rich and poor, trying only to put into each face the eager, upward
+look which should focus all, in spirit as well as in actual direction,
+upon the flying, luminous figure. In some attempts she succeeded and
+in some she failed. There was one old woman, with abnormally deep
+wrinkles, and shoulders somewhat out of drawing, whose face had caught
+a curiously inspired look; Madge did not dare touch her again for fear
+of losing it. Her artist, on the other hand, the young man with the
+ideal brow and very large eyes, grew more and more inane and
+expressionless the more eagerly his creator worked at him.
+
+On the whole, the production as a two-hour composition by a three-year
+student was rather good than bad. When time was called Madge felt
+pretty sure that she should not win the prize; she had undertaken too
+much, both for the occasion and for her own ability. And yet it was
+borne in upon her to-day that she was going to make a better artist
+than she had ever before dared hope.
+
+So absorbed had she been in her own work, that she had completely
+forgotten Eleanor, and had not even been aware that her friend had
+begun painting an hour ago. Now she turned to her with compunction in
+her heart. Eleanor held her finished sketch in her hand, but her eyes
+had wandered to the high, broad north window which was one great sheet
+of radiant blue sky.
+
+Eleanor's composition was very simple, but extremely well done, and in
+the glance Madge was able to give it before the sketches were handed
+in she saw that it was delicately suggestive. It represented a curving
+shore, a quiet sea, and a saffron sky,--no sails on the sea, no clouds
+in the sky. Upon the shore stood a solitary pine-tree, almost denuded
+of branches, and against the tree leaned the slender figure of a
+youth, looking dreamily across the sea to the horizon, where the
+saffron colour was tinged with gold. That was all, but Madge felt sure
+that it was enough; and, as she thought about it, she felt herself
+very small and crude and confused, and she was conscious of a
+perfectly calm and dispassionate wish to tear her own sketch in two.
+She did not do so, however. There was no irritation, nor envy, nor
+even displeasure, in her mind. She had not supposed that either she or
+Eleanor could do anything so good as that sketch,--since one of them
+could, why, that was just so much clear gain.
+
+A moment later the studio was in a tumult. The sketches had been
+handed over to the three judges, who had gone into instant
+consultation over them. Mrs. Jacques had decreed, with characteristic
+decision, that the judges were bound to be as prompt as the
+competitors, and the award was promised within half an hour. What
+wonder if the usual tumult of dispersion was increased tenfold by the
+excitement of the occasion? The voices were pitched in a higher key,
+the easels clattered more noisily than ever, there was a more lively
+movement among the many-hued aprons, as they were pulled off and
+consigned with many a shake and a flourish to their respective pegs.
+
+[Illustration: "Eleanor's eyes had wandered to the high, broad north
+window."]
+
+"What did you paint?" asked one high voice, whose owner was
+enthusiastically shaking the water from her paint-brush all over the
+floor.
+
+"I painted you--working for the prize."
+
+"Not really!"
+
+"Yes, really! You were just at the right angle for it, and you did
+look so hopeful!"
+
+"You can't make me believe you played such a shabby trick upon me,
+Mary Downing!"
+
+"Shabby! If you knew how good-looking you were at a three-eighths'
+angle you would be grateful to me! You did have such an inspired look
+for a little while,--before you got disgusted, and began to wash
+out."
+
+"Jane Rhoades did an awfully pretty thing--a white bird with a boy
+running after it. But I felt perfectly certain that the little wretch
+had a gun in his other hand!"
+
+"What a fiery head you gave your angel, Mattie Stiles! He looked like
+Loge in _Rheingold!_"
+
+"I don't care," said Mattie, in a tone of voice that showed that she
+did care very much indeed. "I do like red hair, and we haven't had a
+chance to paint any all winter."
+
+"Red hair wouldn't make Titians of us," sighed Miss Isabella Ricker,
+who was of a despondent temperament.
+
+"It wouldn't be any hindrance, anyhow!" Mattie insisted.
+
+Meanwhile the half-hour was drawing to a close. A general air of rough
+order had descended upon the studio. The girls were sitting or
+standing about in groups, their remarks getting more disjointed and
+irrelevant as the nervousness of anticipation grew upon them. Madge
+and Eleanor had found a seat on the steps of the platform. The former
+was making a pencil sketch of Miss Isabella Ricker, who had abandoned
+herself to dejection in a remote corner of the room. Madge looked up
+suddenly, and found that Eleanor was watching her work.
+
+"Your thing is very interesting," she remarked, in a reserved tone,
+which, nevertheless, sent the colour mounting slowly up her friend's
+sensitive cheek. They both understood that no more commendatory
+adjective than "interesting" was to be found in the art-student's
+vocabulary.
+
+"You're partial, Madge."
+
+"Not a bit of it. But I know an interesting thing when I see it. If
+you win the prize," she asked abruptly, "what shall you do with the
+money?"
+
+"If you go to the moon next week, what shall you do with the green
+cheese?" Eleanor retorted, with an unprecedented outburst of sarcasm.
+
+"I think you might answer my question," said Madge; and at that
+instant the door opened and a hush fell upon the room.
+
+The suspense was not painfully prolonged. The Curator of the Art
+Museum, who had been associated with Mrs. Jacques and Mr. Salome as
+judge, stepped upon the platform, from which Madge and Eleanor had
+precipitately retreated, and made the following announcement:
+
+"We have, on the whole," he said, "been very well pleased with the
+work we have had to consider. In fact, several of the sketches were
+better than anything we had looked for. Nevertheless our decision was
+not a difficult one, and our choice is unanimous. The prize which Mrs.
+Jacques has had the originality and the generosity to offer has been
+awarded to Mary Eleanor Merritt."
+
+                  *       *       *       *       *
+
+"And now will you answer my question?"
+
+Madge and Eleanor were walking home together through the light snow
+which had just begun to fall. They had been curiously shy of speaking,
+and, before the silence was broken, a pretty wreath of snow had formed
+itself about the rim of each of their black felt hats, while little
+ribbons of it were decorating the folds of their garments.
+
+"What are you going to do with your green cheese?"
+
+"I shall go to Paris next autumn," said Eleanor, tightly clasping the
+check which she held inside her muff.
+
+"That's what I thought," said Madge; and if her eyes grew a trifle red
+and moist it was perhaps natural enough, since the snow was flying
+straight into them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE MINIATURE
+
+
+"What makes you keep looking at me, Eleanor Merritt? You're not a bit
+of a good model!"
+
+Thus reproved, Eleanor once more fixed her eyes upon a very bad
+oil-portrait of Great-grandfather Burtwell, an elderly man of a wooden
+countenance, in stock and choker, surmounting an expanse of black
+broadcloth which occupied two-thirds of the canvas.
+
+The girls were established in what was known as the spare-room of the
+Burtwell house, which, with its north light and usual freedom from
+visitors made a very good studio. Madge was painting a miniature of
+Eleanor. The diminutive size of her undertaking was causing her a good
+deal of embarrassment, and she was consequently inclined to be rather
+severe with her sitter.
+
+"You know I am not going to have many more chances of looking at you
+for a year to come," Eleanor urged, in a tone of meek dejection.
+
+"And I can't see you, even now," Madge persisted, "if you don't turn
+more toward the light."
+
+There was silence again for some minutes, while Madge painted steadily
+on. Difficult as was this new task which she had set herself, she was
+captivated with it. However the miniature might turn out as a
+likeness, she felt sure that each stroke of her brush was making a
+prettier picture of it. The eyes already had the real Eleanor look,
+and the hair was "pretty nice." The mouth was troublesome, to be sure,
+and to-day she did not feel inspired to improve it, and had turned her
+attention to less important details.
+
+"You've got such a pretty ear!" she remarked presently, as she touched
+its outermost rim with a hair line, cocking her head to one side, the
+while, in a very professional manner; "Did you ever notice what a
+pretty ear you have?"
+
+"Better be careful how you talk about it," Eleanor laughed, "for fear
+it should begin to burn!"
+
+The artist looked in some trepidation at the feature in question, but
+its soft hue did not deepen. She took the precaution, however, to
+change the subject; to one which she often chose, indeed, for the sake
+of the animation it brought into the pretty face of her model.
+Eleanor's "repose" sometimes bothered her.
+
+"What shall you do the first day in Paris?" Madge asked.
+
+"I shall write to you."
+
+"Good gracious! You won't write to me before you have seen the
+Louvre!"
+
+"I shall write to you the very first minute. And then I shall write
+again that same evening, and tell you whether there really is a
+Louvre! If there shouldn't be one, you know, I shouldn't feel so like
+a pig in being there without you!"
+
+"You needn't feel like a pig, as far as that goes," said Madge. "I
+couldn't have gone to Paris if I had won the prize."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Well, I had it out with Father this morning. He says it's not a mere
+matter of money; that if he and Mother thought well of my going, they
+could manage it."
+
+"O Madge! Can't you make them think well of it?"
+
+"I'm afraid not. Father never did really believe in my going in for
+art, and I think he believes in it less now than he ever did. He says
+I've been at it for three years, and I haven't painted a pretty
+picture yet. And he says he doesn't see what good it's going to do me
+in after-life; that if I marry I sha'n't keep it up, and there
+wouldn't be any good in my trying to;--which is, of course a mistake,
+only I can't make him believe that it is,--and he says that if I don't
+marry, I've got to earn my living sooner or later."
+
+"Why, but that's just it, Madge! You're going to be able to earn your
+living! You're sure to!"
+
+But Madge was again engrossed in her work. The afternoon would soon
+draw to a close, and if she wished to carry out her designs upon that
+ear it behooved her to stop talking. Though her little picture was an
+oval of three inches by four, it had cost her more strokes than any
+canvas of ten times the size had ever done. And Eleanor was to sail in
+a fortnight!
+
+At last the light began to fade, and Madge knew that she must stop.
+
+"What do you suppose Father said to me this morning?" she asked, as
+she washed out her brushes and put her paint-box in order.
+
+"I can't imagine."
+
+"Well, he said that when any good judge thought my pictures worth
+paying for in good hard cash, it would be time to think of sending me
+'traipsing over the world with my paint-pot.' He said that if I would
+come to him with a fifty-dollar bill of my own earning he should begin
+to think there was some sense in my art-talk."
+
+"Did he really say that? Why, Madge, who knows?"
+
+Madge had shut up her paint-box and moved to the window, where she was
+gloomily looking down into her neighbours' backyards.
+
+"If you mean Noah's Dove," she said, "You might as well give him up.
+He's come back for the thirteenth time."
+
+Now "Noah's Dove" was the name which Madge had bestowed upon a small
+bundle of pen-and-ink sketches which she had been sending about to the
+illustrated papers for two or three months past, and which had earned
+their name by the persistency with which they had found their way back
+again. The girls had both thought them funny and original; indeed
+Eleanor, with the partiality of one's best friend, did not hesitate to
+pronounce them better than many of the things that got accepted. Up to
+this time, however, no editor had seemed disposed to recognise their
+merits, and they had been repeatedly and ignominiously rejected.
+
+"But you'll keep on sending them, won't you, Madge?" Eleanor
+insisted.
+
+"Of course I shall, as long as there is a picture-paper left in the
+country; though the postage does cost an awful lot!"
+
+The sun had set, and a tinge of rosy colour was spreading across the
+northern sky behind the chimneys. The girls stood silent for a moment,
+watching the colour deepen, while a wistful look came into Eleanor's
+face.
+
+"After all, Madge," she said; "it must be nice to have somebody think
+for you, even when he doesn't think the way you want him to."
+
+"Oh, of course, Father's a dear. I don't suppose I would swap him off,
+even for Paris!"
+
+"I wish I could even remember my father or my mother, or anybody that
+really belonged to me!" Eleanor said; then, feeling that she was
+making an appeal for sympathy, a thing which she was principled
+against doing, she turned her eyes away from the tender, beguiling
+colour behind the chimneys, and looked, instead, at the big oil
+portrait on the wall. "It's something to have even a painted
+grandfather of your own!" she declared.
+
+"How I should love to give you mine!" laughed Madge. "He's such a
+horrible daub, and I should so like to have the frame when it comes
+time to exhibit! You would not insist upon having him in a frame,
+would you, Nell?"
+
+Presently the girls went down-stairs together and Eleanor stayed to
+tea, and told the family all about her Paris plans, and how she felt
+like a pig to be going without Madge. And all the time, as she talked
+to these kindly, sympathetic people, it seemed to her that Madge was
+even more to be envied than she; and she wished she knew how to say so
+in an acceptable manner. But Eleanor found as much difficulty as most
+of us do, in expressing our best and truest thoughts, and so the
+Burtwell family never knew what a heart-warming impression they had
+made upon their guest.
+
+Eleanor had lived for the past three years with a married cousin, a
+daughter of the not particularly congenial or affectionate Aunt Sarah,
+now deceased, who had brought her up from babyhood. The gentle,
+sensitive girl, with the artistic temperament, had never been happy
+with her cousin, though the latter was far from suspecting the fact.
+Mrs. Hamilton Hicks was fond of Eleanor, or imagined herself to be so,
+and she always gave her young cousin her due share of credit, in view
+of the fact that they had "never had any words together."
+Nevertheless, she had acceded very readily to the Paris plan, and had
+herself taken pains to find a suitable chaperon for the young
+traveller.
+
+The result was, that on the fifteenth of September Eleanor went forth
+into the great world in company with a lively and voluble Frenchwoman,
+a lady whom she had seen but twice before in her life, who had
+promised to establish her in a good private family in Paris. And since
+Mrs. Hamilton Hicks had negotiated the arrangement, its success was a
+foregone conclusion.
+
+When Madge left the railway station after bidding Eleanor good-bye,
+and stepped out into the crowded city thoroughfare, the world seemed
+to her very empty and desolate, in spite of the multitude of her
+fellow-creatures who jostled against her. She could think of nothing
+but Eleanor, standing on the platform of the car as the train moved
+out of the station, and she was desperately sorry to have lost the
+last sight of her friend's tearful face, because of a curious blur
+that had come over her own eyes at the moment. At the recollection,
+she mechanically put her hand into her pocket in search of the
+miniature which she usually carried about with her. She had left it at
+home lest she should lose it in the crowded railway station. It gave
+her a pang not to find it, and she made up her mind then and there
+that she would never go without it again.
+
+The moment she reached her own room she seized the picture and had a
+good look at it. She had placed it in the inner gilt rim of an old
+daguerreotype, which set it off very nicely. She had discarded the
+hard leather daguerreotype case, as being too clumsy to carry about in
+her pocket, and in its place had made a sort of pocket-book of red
+morocco which was a sufficient protection for the glass, in her
+careful keeping.
+
+She had never liked the picture so well as she did to-day, for she
+thought of it now for the first time, not as a work of art, but as a
+likeness, and imperfect as it was, even from that point of view, it
+gave her very great pleasure to look at it. Yes, decidedly, she must
+always have it by her hereafter; and she slipped it into her pocket
+while she made herself ready for tea.
+
+But supposing she should have her pocket picked! A pickpocket, she
+reflected, might, in the hastiness which must always characterise his
+operations, mistake the little leather case for a purse, and then--how
+should she ever get the precious miniature back again? "Not that he
+would want to keep it," she said to herself, as she took it out once
+more for a parting look,--"unless he should lose his heart to that
+ear!"--and she regarded the tiny pink object with pardonable pride.
+But with the best intentions in the world, how would he be able to
+restore it? She must put her address in the case; that would be a
+simple matter.
+
+An hour later, the family were gathered about the great round table in
+the pleasant sitting-room, pursuing their various avocations by the
+light of an excellent argand burner. Mr. Burtwell was reading his
+evening paper, imparting occasional choice bits to his wife and his
+eldest daughter, Julia, who were dealing with a heap of mending. The
+two younger children were playing lotto, while Ned was having a
+hand-to-hand tussle with his Cicero, a foeman likely to prove worthy
+of his steel.
+
+Madge had taken out a sheet of paper, with a view to inscribing her
+address upon it. The mere act of doing so had called up to her mind so
+vivid an impression of the thief for whose information it was
+destined, that she suddenly felt impelled to address to him a few
+words of admonition. With an agreeable sense of the absurdity of her
+performance, she began a letter to this figment of her imagination,
+and this is what she wrote:
+
+                  *       *       *       *       *
+
+"DEAR PICKPOCKET,
+
+"For, as I shall never leave this miniature about anywhere, you must
+be a pickpocket if it falls into your hands. To begin with, then; it
+is not a good miniature at all, and there is no use in your trying to
+sell it. In fact, it is a very bad miniature, as you will see if you
+know anything about such things, which you probably don't. But it is
+very valuable to me, and so I hope you will return it to me as soon as
+you find out how bad it is. You probably won't want to bring it
+yourself,--I'm sure I should not think you would!--but you can
+perfectly well send it by express, and you can let them collect
+charges on delivery, unless you think that, under the circumstances,
+you ought to prepay them. My address is,
+
+                                         Miss Margaret Burtwell," etc.
+
+                  *       *       *       *       *
+
+Madge read over her production with an amusement and satisfaction
+which quite filled, for the moment, the aching void of which she had
+been so painfully conscious. The letter occupied but one-half the
+sheet, and, as the young artist's eye fell upon the blank third page,
+she was seized with an irresistible impulse to draw a picture on it.
+
+The figure of the pickpocket was by this time so vivid to her mind,
+that she began making a pen-and-ink sketch of him, as a dark-browed
+villain in the act of rifling the pocket of a very haughty young woman
+proceeding along the street with an air of extreme self-consciousness.
+The drawing was on a very small scale, and when it was finished to her
+satisfaction there was still half the page unoccupied. Madge hastily
+wrote under the sketch the words: "The Crime," and a moment later she
+was engrossed in the execution of a still more dramatic design,
+representing the criminal in the hands of two stalwart policemen,
+being ignominiously dragged through the street toward a sort of
+mediaeval fortress, with walls some twenty feet thick, upon which was
+inscribed in enormous characters, "JAIL." Still more action was given
+the drawing by the introduction of two or three small and gleeful
+ragamuffins, dancing a derisive war-dance behind the captive, and of
+two dogs of doubtful lineage, barking like mad on the outskirts of the
+group. Under this picture was inscribed, "The Consequences of Crime,"
+and at the bottom of the page appeared the words, "Behold and
+tremble!"
+
+"What's Artful Madge up to?" asked Ned, as he closed his Latin
+Dictionary with a bang.
+
+"Writing a letter," Madge replied, composedly.
+
+"To the Prize Pig?"
+
+"The what?"
+
+"The Prize Pig! You know Eleanor said she felt like a pig to be going
+to Paris without you, and as she got the prize----"
+
+"You impudent boy!"
+
+"Not in the least. I'm only witty."
+
+"Witty!"
+
+"Yes,--I've heard wit defined as the unexpected."
+
+"The dictionary doesn't define it so, and good manners don't define
+impudence as wit."
+
+"We're not discussing impudence, we're discussing wit. And I know
+positively that wit is defined as the unexpected."
+
+"Let's have your authority," said Mr. Burtwell, who had not heard the
+first part of the discussion.
+
+"Let us see what the dictionary says," suggested Julia, who was the
+scholar of the family.
+
+"Very well; and what will you bet that I'm not right?"
+
+"We don't bet in this family," said Mr. Burtwell, with decision.
+
+"Oh, well, that's only a form of speech. What will you do for me,
+Madge, if I'm right?"
+
+"I'll put you into an allegorical sketch."
+
+"Good! I always wondered that you didn't make use of such good
+material in the artful line!"
+
+The wire dictionary-stand, containing the portly form of Webster
+Unabridged, was instantly brought up to the light, and there was half
+a minute's silence while Ned turned the leaves.
+
+"Score me one!" he shouted, in high glee. "Listen to Webster! 'Wit. 3.
+Felicitous association of objects not usually connected, so as to
+produce a pleasant surprise.' Quite at your service, my artful
+relative, whenever you would like a sitting!"
+
+"I protest! You haven't won!"
+
+"Haven't won, indeed! I leave it to the gentlemen of the jury. Is not
+the name of Prize Pig for Miss Eleanor Merritt a 'felicitous
+association of objects not usually connected'?"
+
+"No! The association is infelicitous, and consequently it does not
+produce a 'pleasant surprise.'"
+
+The family listened with the amused tolerance with which they usually
+left such discussions to the two chief wranglers.
+
+"I maintain," insisted Ned, "that the association of objects is
+felicitous, and must be, because it was instituted by Miss Eleanor
+Merritt herself. She won the prize, and she said she was a pig."
+
+"But it doesn't produce a pleasant surprise," Madge objected.
+
+"I beg your pardon! It _has_ produced a pleasant surprise, as I can
+testify, for I have experienced it myself. What is your verdict,
+Mother?"
+
+"My verdict is, that it's a pity, as I always thought it was, that you
+are not to be a lawyer, and that Madge can't do better than practise
+her drawing by making the allegorical sketch."
+
+That Mrs. Burtwell should be on Ned's side was a foregone conclusion,
+and Madge appealed to her father.
+
+"Father, is calling Eleanor Merritt a prize pig a form of wit?"
+
+"Pretty poor wit I should call it!"
+
+"Father is on my side!" shouted Ned. "He says it's poor wit, which is
+only one way of saying that it is wit!"
+
+"Can wit be poor?" asked Julia.
+
+"Father says it can."
+
+"Then it isn't wit!" Madge protested.
+
+"I should like to know why not. Old Mr. Tanner is a poor man, but he's
+a man for all that, and votes at elections for the highest bidder.
+And your logic's poor, but I suppose you'd call it logic!"
+
+"I have an idea!" cried Madge. "I'm going to make my fortune out of
+you! I'm going to make a pair of excruciatingly funny pictures of you!
+The first shall be called _The Student and Logic_, and the second
+shall be called _Logic and the Student!_ In the first the student
+shall be patting Logic on the head, and in the second,--oh, it's an
+inspiration!"
+
+And forthwith Madge seized a large sheet of paper and began work.
+
+"I'm not sure that this won't be the beginning of a series," she
+declared. "When it's finished I shall send it to a funny paper and get
+fifty dollars for it,--and when I have got fifty dollars for it,
+Father will send me to Paris; won't you, Daddy, dear?"
+
+"What's that? What's that?" asked Mr. Burtwell.
+
+"When I get fifty dollars,--_or more!_--for my Student, you will send
+me to Europe!"
+
+"Oh, yes! And when you're Queen of England I shall be presented at
+Court! Listen to what the paper says: 'The Honourable Jacob Luddington
+and family have just returned from an extensive foreign tour. The two
+Miss Luddingtons were presented at the Court of St. James, where their
+exceptional beauty and elegance are said to have made a marked
+impression.' Good for the Honourable Jacob! His father was my father's
+chore-man, and here are his daughters hobnobbing with crowned heads!"
+
+From which digression it is fair to conclude that Mr. Burtwell did not
+attach any great importance to his daughter's question or to his own
+answer. But Madge put away the promise in the safest recesses of her
+memory as carefully as she had tucked the letter to her "dear
+pickpocket" inside the red morocco pocket-book. It seemed as if the
+one were likely to be called for about as soon as the other,--"which
+means never at all!" she said to herself, with a profound sigh.
+
+"The throes of creation have begun," Ned chuckled; and then, as he
+watched his sister's business-like proceedings, marvelling the while
+at what he secretly considered her quite phenomenal skill, he let
+himself be sufficiently carried away by enthusiasm to remark, "I say,
+Madge, you're no fool at that sort of thing, if you _are_ a girl!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+NOAH'S DOVE
+
+
+"I really think, Miss Burtwell, you might be a little more careful,"
+Miss Isabella Ricker wailed, in a tone of hopeless remonstrance. It
+was the third time that morning that Madge had knocked against her
+easel, and human nature could bear no more.
+
+"I think so too," said Madge, in a voice as dejected as her victim's
+own. "If I only knew how to prowl more intelligently, I would, I truly
+would."
+
+"Tie yourself to your own easel," suggested Delia Smith; "then that
+will have to go first."
+
+"You're a good one to talk!" cried Mary Downing. "You've upset my
+things twice this very morning!"
+
+"Put those two behind each other," Josephine Wilkes suggested. "It
+will be a lesson to them."
+
+"And who's going to sit behind the rear one?" somebody asked.
+
+"Harriet Wells," Delia Smith proposed. "Mr. Salome said 'very good' to
+her this morning; she must be proof against adversity."
+
+"No one is proof against adversity," Madge declared, in a tragic tone;
+but her remark passed unheeded. The girls were already at work again,
+and nothing short of another wreck was likely to distract their
+attention. The scrape of a palette-knife, the tread of a prowler, or
+the shoving of a chair to one side, were the only sounds audible in
+the room, excepting when the occasional roar of an electric car or the
+rattle of a passing waggon came in at the open window. It was the
+first warm day in April.
+
+Artful Madge's sententious observation with regard to adversity was
+the fruit of bitter experience. Misfortune's arrows had been raining
+thick and fast about her, and although she was holding her ground
+against them very well, she felt that adversity was a subject on which
+she was fitted to speak with authority.
+
+In the first place, her Student series was proving to be quite as much
+of a Noah's Dove as the first set of sketches which had so signally
+failed to find a permanent roosting-place in an inhospitable world.
+Only yesterday the familiar parcel had made its appearance on the
+front-entry table, that table which, for a year past, she had never
+come in sight of without a quicker beating of the heart. If she ever
+did have a bit of success, she often reflected, that piece of
+ancestral mahogany was likely to be the first to know of it. How often
+she had dreamed of the small business envelope, addressed in an
+unfamiliar hand, which might one day appear there! It would be half a
+second before she should take in the meaning of it. Then would come a
+premonitory thrill, instantly justified by a glance at the upper
+left-hand corner of the envelope, where the name of some great
+periodical would seem literally blazoned forth, however small the
+type in which it was printed. And then,--oh, then! the tearing open of
+the envelope, the unfolding of the sheet with trembling fingers, the
+check! Would it be for $10 or $15 or even $25, and might there be a
+word of editorial praise or admonition? Foolish, foolish dreams! And
+there was that hideous parcel, which she was getting to hate the very
+sight of! As she squeezed a long rope of burnt-sienna upon her
+palette, she made up her mind that she would wait a week before
+exposing herself to another disappointment. Perhaps the Student would
+improve with keeping, like violins and old masters. Certainly if he
+was anything like his prototype he needed maturing.
+
+Meanwhile the model's mouth was proving as troublesome to paint as
+Eleanor's had been, and as Madge grew more and more perplexed with the
+problem of it she thought of the miniature with a fresh pang. For she
+had lost it! Three days ago it had somehow slipped from her
+possession. Had she left it lying on the table in the Public Library?
+Nobody there had seen anything of it. But on the very day of her loss
+she had been at the Library, examining the current numbers of all the
+illustrated papers, in the hope of gleaning some hint as to editorial
+tastes. She remembered reading Eleanor's last letter there, the letter
+in which her friend had written that she was to have two years more of
+Paris. She had read the letter through twice, and then she had taken
+out the miniature and had a good look at it. To think of Eleanor,
+having two more years of Paris! And it had all come about so simply!
+She had merely persuaded her cousin, Mr. Hicks, to advance a few
+hundred dollars till she should be of age and at liberty to sell a
+bond.
+
+"There isn't anybody that believes in me," Madge had told herself; and
+then she had thought of something that Mr. Salome had said to her a
+few days ago, something that she would have considered it very
+unbecoming to repeat, even to Eleanor, but the memory of which, thus
+suddenly recalled, had filled her with such hopefulness that she had
+sped homeward to the mahogany table almost with a conviction of
+success. Was it in that sudden rush of hopefulness, so mistaken, alas,
+so groundless, that she had left the little morocco case lying about?
+Or had she pulled it out of her pocket with her handkerchief? Or had
+she really had her pocket picked?
+
+What wonder that in the stress of anxious speculation she was making
+bad work of her painting! This would never do! She took a long stride
+backwards, and over went Miss Ricker's long-suffering easel, prone
+upon the floor, carrying with it a neighbouring structure of similar
+unsteadiness, which was, however, happily empty, save for a couple of
+jam-pots filled with turpentine and oil! These plunged with headlong
+impetuosity into space, forming little rivers of stickiness, as they
+rolled half-way across the room. Everybody rushed to the rescue, while
+Miss Ricker gazed upon the catastrophe with stony displeasure.
+
+By a miracle, the canvas, though "butter-side-down," had escaped
+unscathed. Not until she was assured of this did the culprit speak.
+
+"I'm a disgrace to the class," she said, "and expulsion is the only
+remedy. Tell Mr. Salome that I have forfeited every right to
+membership, and it's quite possible that I may never exaggerate
+another detail as long as I live."
+
+"Time's up in two minutes," Mary Downing remarked, in her
+matter-of-fact voice, as she dabbed some yellow-ochre upon her
+subject's chin. "I rather think you'll come back to-morrow."
+
+"But I do think it's somebody's else turn to work behind her," said
+Josephine Wilkes.
+
+Miss Ricker gave a faint, assenting smile.
+
+"I think Miss Ricker is very much indebted to Artful Madge," Harriet
+Wells declared. "There isn't another girl in the class who could have
+knocked that easel over without damaging the picture."
+
+"Practice makes perfect," some one observed; and then, time being
+called, everybody began talking at once, and wit and wisdom were
+alike lost upon the company.
+
+But Artful Madge was not to be lightly consoled.
+
+"Mother," she said, that same afternoon, as she came into the little
+sitting-room over the front entry, where her mother was stitching on
+the sewing-machine, "I think I should like to do something useful. I'm
+kind of tired of art."
+
+Madge had been helping wash the luncheon dishes, and was beginning to
+wonder whether her talents were not, perhaps, of a purely domestic
+order.
+
+"I should think you _would_ be tired of it!" said Mrs. Burtwell, in
+perfect good faith, as she snipped the thread at the end of a seam.
+"How you can make up your mind to spend all your days bedaubing your
+clothes with those nasty paints passes my comprehension."
+
+"But sometimes I daub the canvas," Madge protested, with unwonted
+meekness, as she drew a grey woollen sock over her hand, and pounced
+upon a small hole in the toe; and at that very instant, which Madge
+was whimsically regarding as a possible turning-point in her career,
+the doorbell rang.
+
+"A gintleman to see you, Miss," said Nora, a moment later, handing
+Madge a card.
+
+"To see me?" asked Madge, incredulously, as she read the name, "Mr.
+Philip Spriggs! Are you sure he didn't ask for Father?"
+
+But Nora was quite clear that she had not made a mistake.
+
+"Who is it, Madge?" Mrs. Burtwell queried.
+
+"It's probably a book agent," said Madge, as she went down-stairs to
+the parlour, rather begrudging the interruption to her darning bout.
+
+Standing by the window, hat in hand, was an elderly man of a somewhat
+severe cast of countenance, as unsuggestive as possible, in his
+general appearance, of the comparatively frivolous name which a
+satirical fate had bestowed upon him.
+
+As Madge entered the room he observed, without advancing a step toward
+her: "You are Miss Burtwell, I suppose. I came to answer your letter
+in person."
+
+"My letter?" asked Madge, with a confused impression that something
+remarkable was going forward.
+
+"Yes; this one,"--and he drew from his pocket the red morocco
+miniature case.
+
+"Oh!" cried Madge, "how glad I am to have it!--and how kind you are to
+bring it!--and, oh! that dreadful letter!"
+
+The three aspects of the case had chased each other in rapid
+succession through her mind, and each had got its-self expressed in
+turn.
+
+Mr. Spriggs did not relax a muscle of his face.
+
+"I found this on a table in the Public Library," he stated. "Your
+directions were so explicit that I could do no less than be guided by
+them."
+
+There was something so solemn, almost judicial, about her guest that
+Madge became quite awestruck.
+
+"Won't you please take a seat?" she begged, humbly. "I think I could
+apologise better if you were to sit down."
+
+"Then you consider that there is occasion to apologise?" he asked,
+taking the proffered chair, and resting his hat upon the floor.
+
+"Indeed, yes!" said Madge. "It's perfectly dreadful to think of the
+letter having fallen into the hands of any one so--" and she broke
+short off.
+
+"So what?" asked Mr. Spriggs.
+
+"Why, so dignified and so--very different from--" but again she found
+herself unable to finish her sentence.
+
+"From a 'dear pickpocket?'" he suggested.
+
+"Did I say 'dear pickpocket'?" cried Madge in consternation. "I didn't
+know I said 'dear.'"
+
+"I suppose you desired to make a favourable impression, in order to
+get your picture back. There are some very good points about the
+picture," he remarked, as he took it out of the case and examined it.
+"There's a good deal of drawing in it, and considerable colour."
+
+"Do you know about pictures?" asked Madge with eager interest.
+
+"Not much. I've heard more or less art-jargon in my day; that's all."
+
+Madge looked at him suspiciously.
+
+"I am sure you will agree with me that I don't know much," he
+continued, "when I tell you that I prefer your pen-and-ink work to the
+miniature. 'The Consequences of Crime' is full of humour; and I have
+been given to understand that you can't produce an effect without
+skill,--what you would probably dignify with the name of technique.
+The second small boy on the right is not at all bad."
+
+"You do know about art!" cried Madge. "I rather think you must be an
+artist."
+
+Mr. Spriggs did not exactly change countenance; he only looked as if
+he were either trying to smile or trying not to. Madge wished she
+could make out just what were the lines and shadows in his face that
+produced this singular expression.
+
+"Have you never thought of doing anything for the papers?" he asked.
+
+"Thought of it! I've spent four dollars and sixty-one cents in postage
+within the last ten months, and he always comes back to the ark!"
+
+"'He'? Comes back where?"
+
+"To the ark. I call the package 'Noah's Dove' because it never finds a
+place to roost."
+
+"The original dove did, after a while." Mr. Spriggs spoke as if he
+were taking the serious, historical view of the incident. "I imagine
+yours will, one of these days. Have you got anything you could show
+me?"
+
+"Would you really care to see?"
+
+"I can't tell till you show me," he said cautiously; but this time
+there was something so very like a smile among the stern features that
+Madge could see just what the line was that produced it.
+
+She flew to her room, and seized Noah's Dove, and in five minutes that
+much-travelled bird had spread his wings,--all six of them,--for the
+delectation of this mysterious critic.
+
+Madge watched him, as he leaned back in his chair and examined the
+sketches. He seemed inclined to take his time over them, and she felt
+sure that her Student had never before been so seriously considered.
+
+At last Mr. Spriggs laid the drawings upon the table and fixed his
+thoughtful gaze upon the artist. His contemplation of her countenance
+was prolonged a good many seconds, yet Madge did not feel in the least
+self-conscious; it never once occurred to her that this severe old
+gentleman was thinking of anything but her Student. She found herself
+taking a very low view of her work, and quite ready to believe that
+perhaps, after all, those unappreciative editors knew what they were
+about.
+
+"Have you ever sent these to the _Gay Head?_" her visitor inquired
+casually.
+
+"Oh, no! I should not dare send anything to the _Gay Head!_"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Why! Because it's the best paper in the country. It would never look
+at my things."
+
+"It certainly won't if you never give it a chance. You had better try
+it," he went on, in a tone that carried a good deal of weight. "You
+know they can do no worse than return it; and I should think, myself,
+that the _Gay Head_ was quite as well worth expending postage-stamps
+on as any other paper. Mind; I don't say they'll take your
+things,--but it's worth trying for. By the way," he added as he rose
+to go; "I wouldn't send No. 5 if I were you; it's a chestnut."
+
+He had picked up his hat and stood on his feet so unexpectedly that
+Madge was afraid he would escape her without a word of thanks.
+
+"Oh, please wait just a minute," she begged. "I haven't told you a
+single word of how grateful I am. I feel somehow as if,--as if,--_the
+worst were over!_" This time Mr. Spriggs smiled broadly.
+
+"And you will send Noah's Dove to the _Gay Head?_"
+
+"Yes, I will, because you advise me to. But you mustn't think I'm
+conceited enough to expect him to roost there."
+
+And that very evening the dove spread his wings,--only five of them
+now,--and set forth on the most ambitious flight he had yet ventured
+upon.
+
+In the next few days Madge found her thoughts much occupied with
+speculations regarding her mysterious visitor; everything about him,
+his name, his errand, both the matter and the manner of his speech,
+roused and piqued her curiosity. It was clear that he knew a great
+deal about art. And yet, if he were an artist, she would certainly
+be familiar with his name. Whatever his calling, he was sure to
+be distinguished. Those judicial eyes would be severe with any
+work more pretentious than that of a mere student; that firm,
+discriminating hand,--she had been struck with the way he handled her
+sketches,--would never have signed a poor performance. Perhaps it was
+Elihu Vedder in disguise,--or Sargent, or Abbey! Since the descent of
+the fairy-godmother upon the class a year ago, no miracle seemed
+impossible. And yet, the miracle which actually befell would have
+seemed, of all imaginable ones, the most incredible. It took place,
+too, in the simplest, most unpremeditated manner, as miracles have a
+way of doing.
+
+One evening, about a week after the return of the miniature, the
+family were gathered together as usual about the argand burner. It was
+a warm evening, and Ned, who was to devote his energies to the cause
+of electrical science, when once he was delivered from the thraldom of
+the classics, had made some disparaging remarks about the heat
+engendered by gas.
+
+"By the way," said Mr. Burtwell, "that, reminds me! I have a letter
+for you, Madge. I met the postman just after I left the door this
+noon, and he handed me this with my gas bill. Who's your New York
+correspondent?"
+
+"I'm sure I don't know," said Madge, with entire sincerity, for it was
+far too early to look for any word from the _Gay Head_.
+
+The letter had the appearance of a friendly note, being enclosed in a
+square envelope, undecorated with any business address. Madge opened
+it, and glanced at the signature, which was at the bottom of the first
+page. The blood rushed to her face as her eye fell upon the name:
+"Philip Spriggs, Art Editor of the _Gay Head_."
+
+She read the letter very slowly, with a curious feeling that this was
+a dream, and she must be careful not to wake herself up. This was what
+she read:
+
+                  *       *       *       *       *
+
+"MY DEAR MISS BURTWELL,
+
+"We like Noah's Dove as much as I thought we should. We shall hope to
+get him out some time next year. Can't you work up the pickpocket
+idea? That small boy, the second one from the right, is nucleus enough
+for another set. In fact, it is the small-boy element in your Student
+that makes him original--and true to life. We think that you have the
+knack, and count upon you for better work yet. We take pleasure in
+handing you herewith a check for this.
+
+                                                 "Yours truly,
+                                                   "PHILIP SPRIGGS."
+
+                  *       *       *       *       *
+
+The check was a very plain one on thin yellow paper, not in the least
+what she had looked for from a great publishing-house; but the amount
+inscribed in the upper left-hand corner of the modest slip of paper
+seemed to her worthy the proudest traditions of the _Gay Head_ itself.
+The check was for sixty dollars.
+
+As Madge gradually assured herself that she was awake, the first
+sensation that took shape in her mind was the very ridiculous one of
+regret that the mahogany table should have been deprived of its
+legitimate share in this great event. And then she remembered that it
+was her father himself who had handed her the letter.
+
+She was still wondering how she should break the news to him, when she
+found herself giving an odd little laugh, and asking, "Father, what is
+your favourite line of ocean steamers?"
+
+Mr. Burtwell, who had really felt no special curiosity as to his
+daughter's correspondent, was once more immersed in his evening paper.
+He looked up, at her words, as all the family did, and was struck by
+the expression of her face.
+
+"What makes you ask that?" he demanded sharply.
+
+"Because I know you always keep your promises, and--there's a letter
+you might like to read."
+
+Mr. Burtwell took the letter, frowning darkly, a habit of his when he
+was puzzled or anxious. He read the letter through twice, and then he
+examined the check. He did not speak at once. There was something so
+portentous in this deliberation, and something so very like emotion in
+his kind, sensible face, that even Ned was awed into respectful
+silence.
+
+At last Mr. Burtwell turned his eyes to his daughter's face, where
+everything, even suspense itself, seemed arrested, and said, in a
+matter-of-fact tone:
+
+"I think you had better go by the North German Lloyd. Shall you start
+this week?"
+
+"Oh, you darling!" cried Madge, throwing her arms about her father's
+neck, regardless of letter and check, which, being still in his
+hands, were called upon to bear the brunt of this attack; "How can I
+ever make up my mind to leave you?"
+
+
+
+
+THE IDEAS OF POLLY
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+DAN'S PLIGHT
+
+
+"_Well_, Mis' Lapham, I _am_ sorry to hear it, I _must_ say! It _doos_
+seem's though you'd _had_ your share of affliction!"
+
+Mrs. Henry Dodge always emphasised a great many of her words, which
+habit gave to her remarks an impression of peculiar sincerity and
+warmth; a perfectly correct impression, too, it must be admitted. Her
+needle, moreover, being quite as energetic as her tongue, she was a
+valuable member of the sewing-circle, at which function she was now
+assisting with much spirit.
+
+Mrs. Lapham accepted this tribute to her many trials with becoming
+modesty. She was a dull, colourless woman whose sole distinction lay
+in the visitations of affliction, and it is not too much to affirm
+that she was proud of them. She was sewing, not too rapidly, on a very
+long seam, which occupation was typical of her course of life. She
+sighed heavily in response to her neighbour's words of sympathy, and
+said:
+
+"It did seem hard that it should have been Dan, just as he was
+beginning to be a help to his uncle, and all. But I s'pose we'd ought
+to have been prepared for it."
+
+"There's been quite a pause in the death-roll," the Widow Criswell
+observed. She was engaged in sewing a button on a boy's jacket with a
+black thread.
+
+"How long is it since Eliza went?" asked Miss Louisa Bailey, pursuing
+the widow's train of thought.
+
+"Seven years this month. She began to cough at Christmas, and by
+Washington's Birthday she was in her grave."
+
+"And Jane? They didn't go very far apart, did they?"
+
+"No, Jane died eleven months before Eliza; and their mother went three
+years before that, and their father when Dan was a baby; that's goin'
+on sixteen years."
+
+"_Well_, you _have_ had a hard time, I _will_ say!" exclaimed Mrs.
+Dodge. "Your Martha losing her little girl, and John's wife breaking
+her collar-bone, and all, and now _this_ to be gone through with! I
+_should_ think you'd feel _discouraged_!"
+
+"I do; real discouraged. But I s'pose it's no more than I'd ought to
+expect, with such an inheritance."
+
+"Have there been many cases of lung-trouble on your side of the
+family, Mrs. Lapham?" Miss Bailey inquired with respectful interest.
+
+"No; Sister Fitch was the first case."
+
+For a few seconds, conversation languished, and only the snip of Mrs.
+Royce's scissors could be heard, and the soft rustle of cotton cloth.
+The sewing-circle was going on in the church vestry where there was a
+faint odour from the kerosene lamps, which had just been lighted. The
+Widow Criswell was the first to break the silence.
+
+"Polly ain't showed no symptoms yet, has she?" she asked, testing one
+of the buttons as if sceptical of her thread.
+
+"Well, no; not yet. But then Dan seemed as smart as anybody six months
+ago, and just look at him to-day!"
+
+The mental eyes of a score of women were turned upon Dan, as he was
+daily seen, round-shouldered and hollow-chested, toiling along the
+snowy country roads to and from school, coughing as he went. The topic
+was not an uncongenial one to the members of the sewing-circle, who
+had really very little to talk about. So absorbed were they, indeed,
+in the discussion of poor Dan's fate, and of the long list of
+casualties that had preceded it, that no one noticed the entrance of a
+young girl, rosy-cheeked and bright-eyed, who had come to help with
+the supper. There was an air of peculiar freshness about her, and as
+she stood in her blue dress and white apron near the door, her ruddy
+brown hair shining in the lamp-light, the effect was like the opening
+of a window in a close room. Her step was arrested in the act of
+coming forward, and, as she paused to listen, the pretty colour was
+quite blotted out of her cheeks.
+
+"I don't think Dan's will be a lingering case," Mrs. Lapham was
+saying. "The lingering cases are the most trying."
+
+Polly stood motionless. Was it true then, that which she had dreaded,
+that which she had shrunk from facing? Was it more than a cold that
+Dan had got? Was Dan really ill? Her Dan? Really ill? Her heart was
+beating like a trip-hammer, but no one seemed to hear it.
+
+"Queer that the doctors don't find any cure for lung-trouble," Mrs.
+Royce was saying. "Seems as though there must be some way of stopping
+it, if you could only find it out."
+
+"Have you tried Kinderling's Certain Cure?" asked Mrs. Dodge. "They do
+say that it's _very_ efficacious."
+
+"Well, no," said Mrs. Lapham; "I don't hold much to medicines myself;
+but if I did I should think it just a wilful waste to try them for
+Dan. The boy's doomed, to begin with, and there's no help for it."
+
+"There _is_ a help for it, there _shall_ be a help for it!" cried a
+voice, vibrating with youthful energy and emotion. "I don't see how
+you can talk so, Aunt Lucia! Dan _isn't_ doomed! he _sha'n't_ die! I
+won't _let_ him die!"
+
+The women looked at Polly and then they looked at one another, fairly
+abashed by the girl's spirit; all, that is, excepting Aunt Lucia, who
+was not impressionable enough to feel anything but the superficial
+rudeness of Polly's outbreak.
+
+"That'll do, Polly," she said, with a spiritless severity. "This is no
+place for a display of temper."
+
+The colour had come back into the girl's face now, and there were hot
+tears in her eyes. She turned without a word and left the room, nor
+was she seen again among the waitresses who came to hand the tea.
+
+Polly was rather ashamed of having run away from the sewing-circle,
+and she had serious thoughts of going back. It was the first time in
+her life that she had allowed herself to be routed by circumstances;
+but somehow she felt as if she could not find it in her heart to hand
+about tea and seed-cakes, sandwiches and quince-preserve, to people
+who could think such dreadful thoughts of Dan. And then, besides, she
+knew what a pleasant surprise it would be for Dan to have her all to
+himself for an evening. Uncle Seth would be sure to go for his weekly
+game of checkers with Deacon White, and she could help Dan with his
+algebra and Latin, and see that he was warm and "comfy," and perhaps
+find that he did not cough so much as he did the evening before.
+
+They had a very cozy evening, she and Dan, just as she had planned it
+in every particular but one, namely, the cough. There was no
+improvement in that since the night before, and for the first time the
+boy spoke of it.
+
+"I say, Polly! Isn't it stupid, the way this cold hangs on? Do you
+remember how long it is since I caught it?"
+
+"Why, no, Dan. It does seem a good while, doesn't it? I guess it must
+be about over by this time. Don't you know how suddenly those things
+go?"
+
+Dan, who was on his way to bed, had stopped, close to the air-tight
+stove, to warm his hands.
+
+"I wish it were summer, Polly," he said, with a wistful look in his
+great black eyes that cut Polly to the heart. "It's been such a cold
+winter; and a fellow gets kind of tired of barking all the time."
+
+"It'll be spring before you know it, Dan, you see if it isn't, and
+you'll forget you ever had a cold in your life."
+
+And when, half an hour later, the evening was over, and Polly was safe
+in her bed, she buried her head in her pillow and cried herself to
+sleep.
+
+But tears and bewailings were not a natural resource with Polly, whose
+forte was action. Her first thought in the morning was: what should
+she do about it? Something must be done, of course, and she was the
+only one to do it. What it was she had not the faintest idea, but
+then it was her business to find out. Here was she, eighteen years
+old, strong and hearty, and with good practical common sense, the
+natural guardian and protector of her younger brother. It was time she
+bestirred herself!
+
+As a first step, she got up with the sun and dressed herself, and then
+she slipped down-stairs to the parlour where such of her father's
+books as had been rescued from auction were lodged; her father had
+been the village doctor. All the medical works had been sold, and many
+other volumes besides, but among those remaining was an old
+encyclopaedia which had proved to Polly a mine of information on many
+subjects. As she took down the third volume, she heard a portentous
+_Meaouw!_ and there, outside the window, stood Mufty, the grey cat,
+rubbing himself against the frosty pane. Polly opened the window and
+Mufty sprang in, bringing a puff of frosty air in his wake. Without so
+much as a word of thanks he walked over to the stove. Finding it,
+however, cold, as only an empty air-tight stove can be cold, he
+strolled, with a disengaged air, beneath which lurked a very distinct
+intention, toward the only warm object in the room, namely, Polly in
+her woollen gown. She had the volume open on the table before her, and
+was deep in its perusal, murmuring as she read.
+
+"Appears to have committed its ravages from the earliest time," Polly
+read, "and its distribution is probably universal, though far from
+equal."
+
+At this point Mufty lifted himself lightly in the air, after the
+manner peculiar to cats, and landed in Polly's lap. After switching
+his tail across her eyes once or twice, and rubbing himself against
+the book in rather a disturbing way, he at last settled down, and
+began purring vigorously in token of satisfaction. The room was very
+cold, and Polly, without interrupting her reading, was glad to bury
+her hands in the thick fur. Presently the colour in her cheeks grew
+brighter and her breath came quicker. There _was_ a way, after all!
+People had been saved, people a good deal sicker than Dan,--saved by
+a change of climate. What could be simpler? Just to pick Dan up and
+carry him off! And such fun, too!
+
+"Mufty," she whispered, excitedly, "Mufty, what should you say to Dan
+and me going away and never coming back again?"
+
+"_Brrrrr, brrrrr_," quoth Mufty.
+
+"I knew you would approve! You know how necessary it is, and you think
+it best to do it; don't you, Mufty?"
+
+"_Brrrr, brrrrrrrrrr_," quoth Mufty, again.
+
+"O Mufty, what a darling you are, to approve! And there isn't really
+any one's opinion that I care more about!"
+
+She got up and went to the window, while Mufty, not to be dislodged,
+hastily established himself across her shoulder, his fore paws well
+down her back, his tail contentedly waving before her eyes. The
+picture which he thus turned his back upon was a wintry one.
+
+"Cold morning, isn't it, Mufty?" said Polly. "No kind of a climate for
+a delicate person."
+
+"_Brrrr, brrrrrr!_" Mufty was digging a claw into her shoulder to
+adjust himself more comfortably.
+
+"Ow!" cried Polly. Then, lifting him down: "Mufty, you're a very
+intelligent cat, and I haven't a doubt that your judgment is as
+penetrating as your claws. All the same, I guess you'd better get down
+and come with me and help Susan get the breakfast. Don't you hear her
+shaking down the kitchen stove?"
+
+Whereupon Mufty, finding himself dropped upon the coldly unsympathetic
+ingrain carpet, desisted from further encouraging remarks.
+
+Polly was a schoolgirl still, though she was nearing the dignity of
+graduation. She had no special taste for study, but she cherished the
+Yankee reverence for education, and although it was not quite clear to
+her how Latin declensions and algebraic symbols were to help her in
+after-life, she committed them to memory with a very good grace, and
+enjoyed all the satisfaction of work for work's sake.
+
+It happened, therefore, that the pursuit of learning interfered for
+several hours with the far more important object which she had at
+heart to-day; and it was not until two o'clock that she found herself
+at liberty to do what every nerve and fibre of her young organism was
+straining to accomplish.
+
+[Illustration: "Mufty hastily established himself across her shoulder."]
+
+"I'm not going right home," she said to Dan; "I've got an errand to
+do."
+
+"Polly's got an idea," Dan said to himself, struck with the eagerness
+in her face, and the haste with which she walked away. "What a girl
+she is for ideas, any way!" and he trudged along the snowy road with
+the other boys, getting rather out of breath in the effort to keep up
+with them.
+
+Polly, meanwhile, stepped swiftly on her way. She was thinking of Dan.
+He at least was a natural student and had always led his class. She
+was not only fond of Dan, but proud of him, too. He was a handsome
+boy, with those clear, dark eyes of his in which a less partial
+observer than Polly might have read the promise of fine things.
+
+"Yes," Polly said to herself, as she sped along the road that
+glittering winter's day: "Dan isn't just an ordinary boy. He's an
+unusual boy. Why, the world couldn't _afford_ to lose Dan!" and she
+looked into the faces of the passers-by, as if to challenge their
+acquiescence in this bold statement.
+
+Whether Dan was all that Polly thought him, only the future could
+prove,--that future that Polly was about to secure to him. If she
+idealised him a bit, why, all the better for Dan, and all the better
+for Polly, too. One thing is sure, that no one who could have looked
+into the sister's heart that winter's day would have doubted her for
+an instant when she said to herself:
+
+"He sha'n't die! I won't let him die! But, _oh! how I wish that cough
+were mine!_"
+
+From her interview with the doctor, Polly brought away with her only
+one word, "_Colorado_"; and with that word shining like a great snowy
+peak in her imagination, she took another swift walk to a farmhouse
+on the outskirts of the village, where dwelt a man whose son had gone
+to Colorado three years ago.
+
+"Great place!" he told her; "Great place, Colorado! Mile up in the
+air! Prairie-dogs and Rocky Mountains! Big cattle ranches that could
+put all Fieldham in their vest pockets! Cold as thunder, hot as
+thunder! Blizzards and cyclones and water-spouts! Wind! Blow you right
+out of your boots! Cures sick folks? Oh, yes. Better than all the
+doctors. Braces 'em right up--stands 'em on their legs! Nothing like
+it, so Bill says. Costs a sight to get out there; oh, yes! Fifty
+dollars and fifteen cents! Queer about that fifteen cents. Seems as
+though they might ha' throwed that in on such a long trip's that; but
+them railroads ain't got no insides any way; and when you once git out
+there, why, _there you are!_"
+
+The philosophy of that last remark appealed particularly to Polly.
+"When you once git out there, why, _there you are!_" Somehow it seemed
+to make everything perfectly simple and easy. Blizzards and cyclones?
+Yes, to be sure. But then it was the air that you went out for, Polly
+reasoned, that was what was going to cure you; and perhaps the more
+you got of it the quicker you would get cured. And Polly hurried home
+from her last visit, flushed and eager for the fray. She found her
+uncle in the barn putting up his horses.
+
+Mr. Seth Lapham was a good man; there could be no doubt about that.
+Nothing but a sincere and very efficient conscience could have so
+tempered his natural penuriousness as to cause him to receive into his
+family a mere sister-in-law's children and allow them to "want for
+nothing"; that, too, at a time when his own children, John and Martha,
+were still a bill of expense to him, before their respective
+marriages. For many years, Uncle Seth had conscientiously, if not
+lavishly, fed and clothed the little orphans, whose entire patrimony
+in the Savings Bank scarcely yielded interest enough to pay for their
+boots and shoes; but it remained for the present crisis to prove him
+as open-minded as he was conscientious. For, no sooner had Polly
+finished the rapid exposition of her great plan--how they were to draw
+the money from the bank to pay for their tickets and start them in
+their new life, and how they were to earn their own living when once
+they got started--than he was ready to admit the reasonableness of
+it.
+
+"And when you once get out there, why, there you are!" Polly declared,
+in her most convincing tone.
+
+As she stood before him, flushed and breathless, prepared to do battle
+for Dan to the very last extremity, her uncle gave old Dick a slap
+that sent him tramping into his stall, and then said, with the
+drawling accent peculiar to him:
+
+"Well, Polly, you're a pretty sensible girl. If the doctor says so, I
+guess it's wuth trying."
+
+Then Polly, who had so courageously braced herself for the contest,
+experienced an overwhelming revulsion of feeling, and a great wave of
+gratitude and compunction swept over her. To Uncle Seth's speechless
+astonishment she flung her arms around his big neck, and, with some
+thing very like a sob, she cried:
+
+"Oh, Uncle Seth, I never loved you half enough!"
+
+Uncle Seth bore it very well, all things considered. He got pretty red
+in the face, but happily a full grizzly beard kept the secret of his
+blushes.
+
+"Why, Polly!" he said, pounding away on her shoulder in an attempt to
+be consolatory; "you've always ben a good girl; not a mite of trouble,
+not a mite!"
+
+They walked up to the house, Polly holding the rough, hairy hand as
+tightly as if it had been a solid chunk of gold. Before the short walk
+to the kitchen door was finished they had become sworn conspirators,
+and Uncle Seth was so entirely in the spirit of the piece that he held
+Polly back a minute to say, in a sepulchral whisper,
+
+"Just you leave your Aunt Lucia to me. I'll fix her."
+
+Polly never knew all the pains Uncle Seth was at to "fix" Aunt Lucia,
+but by hook or crook the "fixing" was accomplished, and Aunt Lucia had
+given a mournful consent.
+
+"I shouldn't feel it right," she declared, "to let you suppose I
+thought there was any hope of its curing Dan. That boy's doomed, if
+ever a boy was, and I don't know how you'll ever manage with the
+funeral and all, way out there in Colorado, far from kith and kin. But
+your Uncle Seth says you'd better try it, and I ain't one to oppose
+just for the sake of opposin'. I've been through too much for that.
+Only I warn you; mind, you don't forget I warned you."
+
+Polly listened to Aunt Lucia's lugubrious views with scarcely a twinge
+of alarm, and in five minutes she had plunged into preparations for
+the journey.
+
+As for Dan, the mere thought of Colorado seemed to revive him. "Larks"
+of any description had always been very much to his taste, but the
+unending "lark" of an escape into the big world with Polly filled him
+with a fairly riotous joy.
+
+And so it happened that by the time the March thaws were setting in
+and the March winds were getting ready for their boisterous attack,
+Polly and Dan had slipped away, and were travelling as fast as steam
+could carry them toward the high, health-giving region of the Rocky
+Mountains.
+
+"A harebrained venture as ever was!" Miss Louisa Bailey declared when
+she heard of it. "I don't see what Mr. and Mrs. Lapham were thinking
+of, to countenance such a step!"
+
+The monthly sewing-circle had come round again, and Mrs. Lapham, whose
+turn it was to look after the supper, had stepped out of the room for
+a moment.
+
+"Well, I don't know but it's about as well," the Widow Criswell
+rejoined, sighing profoundly. She was more out of spirits than usual
+to-day, for circumstances, otherwise known as Mrs. Royce, the
+president of the sewing-circle, had forced into her hands a baby's
+pinafore, the cheerful suggestiveness of which could only serve to
+deepen her gloom. "The boy's doomed, wherever he is, and Sister
+Lapham never had any real taste for sick-nursing. She's spared a sight
+o' trouble and expense."
+
+"_Well_," said Mrs. Henry Dodge, winding a needleful of No. 20 thread
+off the spool, with the hissing sound familiar to the ears of the
+seamstress, and breaking it off with a snap, "_I_ think it's the very
+_best_ thing that could have been _done_. The minute I _saw_ that
+girl's face last sewing-circle, I _knew_ she'd make out to _save that
+boy_. Mark my words, he'll outlive us all _yet!_ I declare, I always
+_did_ like Polly Fitch. She reminds me of _myself_ when _I_ was a
+girl!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+WESTWARD HO!
+
+
+"Pike's Peak or Bust!" was the chosen motto of those early pilgrims
+who, thirty-odd years ago, crossed the continent in a "prairie
+schooner," escorted by a cavalry guard to keep Indian marauders at a
+respectful distance; and "Pike's Peak or Bust!" was the motto chosen
+by Polly and Dan, our two young modern pilgrims, as they journeyed
+with greater ease, but with no less courage and venturesomeness,
+across the two thousand miles intervening between quiet Fieldham and
+their goal.
+
+"Pike's Peak or Bust!" No one looking into the bright young faces
+turned so bravely westward ho! could have had any doubt as to which of
+the two alternatives hinted at in that picturesque motto would be
+fulfilled for them. On they journeyed, on and on, past populous
+cities, across great rivers, over vast plains brown with last year's
+stubble or white with newly fallen snow, till at last there came a
+morning when they awoke in the tingling dawn, and, looking forth
+across miles of shadowy prairie, beheld a great white dome cut clear
+against a sapphire sky. On the train rushed, on and on, straight
+toward that snowy dome, and, as they drew nearer, other mountains
+began to define themselves on either side the central peak, and
+presently a town revealed itself, and they knew that it could be no
+other than Colorado Springs, sleeping there at the foot of the great
+range, all unconscious of the two young pilgrims, coming so
+confidingly to seek their fortunes within its borders.
+
+Their first spring and summer were a very happy time, of which Polly
+and Dan could relate a hundred noteworthy incidents. They rented a
+tiny cottage of three rooms in the unfashionable part of the town
+where rents were low. Here was a bit of ground all about, and a
+narrow porch that looked straight into the face of the splendid old
+Peak; and here they lived the merriest of lives on the smallest and
+most precarious of incomes; for they were determined to infringe as
+little as possible upon the slender capital, snugly stowed away in a
+Colorado bank.
+
+Dan soon found employment in a livery-stable at fifty cents a day. His
+chief business was the agreeable one of delivering "teams" and
+saddle-horses to pleasure-seekers at the north end of the town, riding
+back to the stable again on a "led horse" provided for the purpose. If
+not a very ambitious calling, it was, at least, exceedingly good fun,
+and it also had the merit of conforming to the doctor's directions.
+"Don't let him get behind a counter or into any stuffy back-office,"
+the doctor had said to Polly. "Whatever he does, let it keep him in
+the open air as much as possible." Had the very obvious wisdom of this
+advice required demonstration, Dan's rapid improvement would have been
+sufficient.
+
+They did not shock the sensibilities of the sewing-circle by writing
+home exactly what the employment was that Dan had found, while, for
+themselves, Polly had her own little ways of embellishing the somewhat
+prosaic situation. She dubbed the young stable-boy Hercules, and
+always spoke of the establishment he served as "The Augaeans." Nor did
+her invention fail when, a month or two later, Dan got a place at
+somewhat higher wages as druggist's messenger; for then he was
+promptly informed that his name was Mercury, and that there were wings
+on his heels, though he could not himself see them, by reason of their
+being turned back, and visible only when his feet were in rapid
+motion!
+
+Meanwhile, Polly, too, was doing her part, though it had not yet
+proved very lucrative. When they first took the house, Dan painted a
+sign for her, bearing the following announcement:
+
+               FINE NEEDLEWORK AND EMBROIDERY TO ORDER.
+
+But the spring and summer went by, and autumn came, and still the sign
+which had ornamented their house-front for so many months had as yet
+attracted the notice of only the impecunious class of customers their
+immediate neighbourhood afforded. Polly had gratefully taken coarse
+work at low prices, but she still hoped for better things. The street
+where their tiny cottage stood, though at the wrong end of the town,
+was a thoroughfare for pleasure parties driving to the great canyons,
+and Polly never saw the approach of a pretty turnout without a thrill
+of hope that the occupants might be attracted by her sign. She knew
+herself to be a quick and skilful needlewoman, and she thought that if
+only she might once get started in well-paid work, Dan, who was
+growing stronger every day, might go on with his education at the
+Colorado College Preparatory School. She had found out all about the
+college, of which she had formed a very high opinion, and she told
+herself proudly that Dan had such a good mind that he would not need
+to study too hard.
+
+One evening in September they were clearing the supper table,
+preparatory to washing up the dishes, which ceremony was one of the
+numerous "larks" by which brother and sister found life diversified
+and enlivened.
+
+"Mercury, I have an idea!" Polly suddenly cried.
+
+"Never saw the time you hadn't, Polly."
+
+"But this is a great idea, a really great one, because it includes all
+the little ones, like Milton's universe in the crescent moon; don't
+you remember?"
+
+"My goody, Polly! But it must be a corker!"--and Dan was all
+attention.
+
+Now Polly, it is needless to repeat, was a young person of ideas; that
+was her strong point, and Dan at least considered her a marvel of
+ingenuity and invention. Their tiny sitting-room, where Dan slept, was
+a witness to her taste and originality. There were picturesque shelves
+which Dan had made in accordance with her directions; there were
+cheesecloth window-curtains, with rustic boughs in place of poles;
+there were barrels standing bottom upward for tables, draped with
+ancient "duds"--a changeable-silk skirt of her mother's over one, a
+moth-eaten camel's-hair shawl over another. The crack in the only
+mirror which a munificent landlord had provided was concealed by a
+kinikinick vine; a piece of Turkey-red at five cents a yard, their one
+bit of extravagance, converted Dan's cot-bed into a canopy of state.
+And having heard Dan chant the praises of her "ideas" with gratifying
+persistence for a month past, Polly had begun to wonder whether they
+might not be turned to account.
+
+"What's the latest idea, Polly?" Dan asked, seizing a dripping handful
+of what they were pleased to call their "family plate."
+
+"Well, Dan, I want you to paint something more on my sign. Only two
+words; it won't take you long."
+
+"What two words?"
+
+"_Also Ideas!_"
+
+Dan reflected a moment, and then he proceeded to dance a jig of
+delight, wildly waving his dish-cloth about Polly's head.
+
+"Polly, you beat the world!" he cried.
+
+A house-painter lived next door, from whom Dan borrowed paint and
+brushes, and before they slept the old sign was further decorated with
+two magic words done in brilliant scarlet. The inscription now read:
+
+               FINE NEEDLEWORK AND EMBROIDERY TO ORDER.
+                              ALSO IDEAS
+
+There was something positively dazzling about those two words in
+flaming scarlet, and Polly and Dan stepped out twice in the course of
+their early breakfast to have a look at them.
+
+"Don't you feel scared, Polly?" asked Dan, as he left her at her
+dish-washing.
+
+"Scared? Not I!" and she walked down the path with him, drying her
+hands on a dish-towel.
+
+It was a delicious morning in late September; the air dry and
+sparkling as a jewel, the mountains baring their shoulders to the
+morning sun. The Peak had already a dash of winter on his crown, but
+the barren slope of rock below looked like an impregnable fortress.
+Polly and Dan were never tired of wondering at the changing moods that
+played so gloriously upon that steadfast front.
+
+"Seems as if they must almost see him from Fieldham this morning, he's
+so bright," said Polly.
+
+"That's so," Dan agreed. "I say, Polly, isn't he enjoying himself,
+though?"
+
+"Course he is!" Polly answered. "Isn't everybody?"
+
+Then Polly went back to her splashing water and flopping dish-towels,
+and was busy for an hour about the house. By and bye she sat herself
+down in the little porch and proceeded to put good honest stitches
+into a child's frock, for the making of which she was to receive
+twenty-five cents. Not very good pay for a day's work, but
+"twenty-five-hundred-million per cent. better than nothing," as she
+had assured the doubtful Dan.
+
+Life looked very different to her since those two bright words had
+been added to the sign. Not that it had looked otherwise than pleasant
+before; but there was so little originality in the idea of doing
+needlework that it had scarcely merited success, while this,--of
+course it must succeed!
+
+In truth, she had sat there hardly an hour, when she distinctly heard
+the occupant of a yellow buckboard read the sign, and then turn to her
+companion with a word of comment. Polly had always had an idea that
+one of those yellow buckboards would be the making of her fortune yet.
+The one in question was drawn by a pretty pair of ponies, and two
+young girls were in possession of it.
+
+"I have an idea they'll notice it again, when they come back this
+way," Polly surmised. "But if they're going up the canyon they won't
+come back till just as I'm getting dinner."
+
+And, sure enough, the mutton stew was just beginning to simmer, when
+there came a rap at the door.
+
+The front door opened directly into the little sitting-room, and was
+never closed in pleasant weather. As Polly emerged from the kitchen,
+her face very red from hobnobbing with the stove, she found one of
+the girls of the yellow buckboard standing in the doorway.
+
+"Good morning, Miss----"
+
+"Fitch. My name is Polly Fitch."
+
+"What a jolly name!" the visitor exclaimed. "I think you must be the
+one with ideas."
+
+"Yes," said Polly, "Do you want one? Come in and take a seat."
+
+"I do want an idea most dreadfully," the young lady rejoined, taking
+the proffered chair. "I want something for a booby prize for a
+backgammon tournament. I don't suppose anybody ever heard of a
+backgammon tournament before, but it's going to be great fun. We are
+doing it to take the conceit out of a young man we know, who declares
+that there's nothing in backgammon that he didn't learn the first time
+he played it with his grandfather."
+
+"And you want a booby prize?" Polly looked thoughtful for the space of
+sixteen seconds. Then she cried; "Oh, I have an idea! Get somebody to
+whittle you a couple of wooden dice; then paint them white and mark
+them with black sixes on each of the six sides of each die. You could
+call it '_a booby pair-o'-dice_' if you don't object to puns!"
+
+"What a good idea! It's simply perfect! I wonder whom I could get to
+do it for me?"
+
+"Why, Dan could do it with his jackknife, just as well as not. If
+you'll come to-morrow morning you shall have them."
+
+Accordingly, the next morning, the young lady appeared, and was
+enchanted with her prize.
+
+"And how much will they be?" she asked.
+
+"Well, I had thought of charging twenty-five cents for an idea, and
+the dice didn't cost us anything and only took a few minutes to
+make."
+
+"Supposing we call it a dollar. Would that be fair?"
+
+"I don't believe they are worth a dollar."
+
+"Yes, they are; I should be ashamed to take them for less. What a
+splendid idea that was of yours, to put out that sign!"
+
+"I should think it was, if I could get any more customers like you!"
+
+"I'll send them to you,--never you fear!"
+
+Miss Beatrice Compton returned to her buckboard a captive to Polly.
+
+"She's the sweetest thing," she told her mother, who chanced to be her
+passenger on this occasion. "She's got eyes and hair exactly of a
+colour, a sort of reddish brown, and her eyes twinkle at you in the
+dearest way, and she wears her hair in the quaintest pug, just in the
+right place on her head, sort of up in the air; and she's a lady, too;
+anybody can see that. I wonder who 'Dan' is; you don't suppose she's
+married, do you?"
+
+"You can't tell," Mrs. Compton replied. "Persons in that walk of life
+marry very young."
+
+"But, Mamma, she isn't a 'person,' and she doesn't belong to 'that
+walk of life.' She's a lady."
+
+Miss Beatrice was as good as her word, and three days had not passed
+when a horseman stopped before the little cottage, sprang from his
+horse, and looked about for a place to tie; there was no hitching-post
+near by. Polly was sitting in the porch making buttonholes.
+
+"If you were coming in here, you'd better lead him right up the walk,"
+she said, "and tie him to the porch-post."
+
+"That's a good idea!" the young man replied, promptly acting upon the
+advice. "You are Miss Polly Fitch, are you not?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I knew you the minute I saw you, because Miss Compton described you
+to me." This was meant to be very flattering, but Polly, who seldom
+missed a point, was quite unconscious that one had been made.
+
+"Have you come for an idea?" she asked, quite innocently, and Mr.
+Reginald Axton, who was rather sensitive, wondered whether she "meant
+anything." On second thoughts he concluded that she did not, and he
+began again:
+
+"I got that booby prize you made."
+
+"Did you?" cried Polly, with animation. "Oh, I wonder whether you
+were the one--" she paused.
+
+"The one that what?" he asked hastily.
+
+"The one that thought there wasn't anything in the game."
+
+"Well, yes, I was. And the others had all the luck, and so of course I
+got beaten."
+
+"Of course!" said Polly, with a twinkle of delight.
+
+"I see you're on their side, but all the same I want you to help me to
+pay them back. You see I wanted to do something about it, and I
+thought of sending Miss Compton some flowers with a verse, and I
+thought perhaps you could do the verse."
+
+"Did you expect me to furnish the idea, too?"
+
+"Why, of course! That's why I came to you. I thought, if you were so
+awfully bright, perhaps you could make verses."
+
+Polly looked thoughtful.
+
+"I should charge you quite a lot for it," she said,--"much as a dollar
+perhaps; for you know writing verses is quite an accomplishment."
+
+"I'll pay a dollar a line for it! I know a fellow that gets more than
+that from the magazines. And I'm sure that it will be good if you do
+it."
+
+"My gracious! that's great pay!" cried Polly, with sparkling eyes,
+ignoring the compliment, but enchanted to hear what a price verses
+brought. "I'll send it to you by mail."
+
+"No, I guess I'll look in every once in a while and see how you're
+getting on!"
+
+"Dear me!" said Polly, "you don't expect me to spend a week over it,
+do you? That isn't why you offered such high pay?"
+
+"Oh, no; the quicker you got it done the more I should be willing to
+pay for it." He paused a moment. "And, Miss Fitch," he went on, "I
+don't care if you make it a little,--well,--a little soft. She
+deserves it, she's such a tease! Her name's Beatrice," he added. "We
+call her Trix, if that'll help you any."
+
+Polly understood Mr. Reginald perfectly, and she dismissed him with a
+twinkle which promised well. Then Polly proceeded to cudgel her
+brain, while the needle went in and out, and a buttonhole formed
+itself in the firm, narrow line that makes of a buttonhole a work of
+art.
+
+"I wish I could rhyme words as well as I can stitches," Polly thought
+to herself, as she held up a completed buttonhole, with the honest
+pride of a good workman. "Sixes,--Trixes! that heart were Trix's! That
+ought to be made to go. A double rhyme, too! I don't believe he
+expects a double rhyme." And in and out and in and out her thoughts
+plied themselves round and about the two words, and her cheeks got
+quite hot with the pleasurable excitement of this new mental
+exercise.
+
+At last she tossed down her work, and, fetching a piece of brown
+wrapping-paper, proceeded, with many erasures and tinkerings, to
+inscribe upon it the following verse:
+
+         Were hearts the dice and love the game,
+             Of no avail were double sixes;
+         On every heart is but one name,
+             We nought could throw but _double-Trixes!_
+
+"Rather neat," said Polly to herself, "rather neat! Now if he were to
+send it with two bunches of roses of six each, I think it could not
+fail to make an impression. I should rather hate to pay another person
+to make love for me, though," she went on, with a little toss of the
+head; and then she picked up her work and began again to "rhyme
+buttonholes."
+
+When Dan came home to supper he had much to learn. He was lost in
+wonder over the rhyme which Polly repeated to him, but still more
+impressed by the four great silver dollars she had to show; for her
+impatient customer had already called for the verses.
+
+"Jiminy!" cried Dan; "that's most a week's earnings for some of us!"
+
+"Yes," Polly replied, demurely; "that's what Mrs. O'Toole would have
+paid me for sixteen baby-dresses. Things even themselves out in the
+long run, don't they, Dan?" As though Polly knew anything about the
+long run, by the way!
+
+Before Christmas Polly was driving a pretty trade, not only in ideas
+but in sewing. She had in all ten dozen pocket handkerchiefs to mark
+for Christmas customers, besides towels and table-linen, sheets and
+pillow-cases. People had found her out, and she had to refuse more
+than one good order for lack of time. But needlework alone, quick as
+she was in doing it, would have given her but a meagre income, had she
+not been able to furnish "also ideas."
+
+One lady, for instance, came to ask her for an "idea" for a
+Thanksgiving dinner, and Polly not only suggested the idea, but
+carried it out for her. She went about with a big basket to all the
+markets and collected perfect specimens of vegetables with which to
+make a centrepiece for the dinner table. The dinner was given in a
+house where the round dining table would seat twenty-four guests. In
+this ample centre she erected a pyramid of fruits of the earth. There
+were crimson beets, pale yellow squashes, scarlet tomatoes, and the
+long, thin fingers of the string-bean; potatoes furnished a
+comfortable brown, which, together with the soft bronze of the onion,
+harmonized discordant colours; and, crowning all, the silken tassel of
+the red-eared corn raised its graceful crest.
+
+The hostess was delighted with her table, and more delighted still
+with the pretty decorator. Polly's fame flew from one to another
+throughout that kindly and prosperous community, and she found herself
+accumulating a goodly hoard. As Christmas drew near, many a perplexed
+shopper came to her for "ideas," and all went away content. She had
+long since discovered that the Colorado shops were treasure-houses of
+pretty things. She never passed a jeweller's window without taking
+note of his latest novelties; she kept an eye upon Mexican and Indian
+bazaars, and Chinese bric-a-brac collections; she made a study of
+Colorado gems, and knew where the prizes lay hidden; she ran through
+the books in the bookstores; she was alert for new inventions in
+harness decoration and bridle trimmings; she gave hints for fancy-work
+of divers kinds.
+
+Mercury, meanwhile, sped about the town, dispensing healing, as Polly
+often reminded him, and "getting more than I dispense, Polly," he
+would declare in return. "I feel so well that everything is a regular
+lark!"
+
+And so Dan made a "lark" of his work, and trotted all day in his
+capacity of Mercury, little dreaming of the wealth that was
+accumulating for his use; while Polly went on with her hoarding, of
+which she made a great secret, and thought of a still better time
+coming.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+A MERRY CHRISTMAS
+
+
+Of all Polly's new friends, not one took a warmer interest in the
+young idea-vendor than that first customer of hers, Miss Beatrice
+Compton. Miss Beatrice was a warm-hearted and enthusiastic girl, who
+never did anything by halves; and when she talked of Polly, of Polly's
+skill and of Polly's originality, when she extolled Polly's eyes and
+Polly's hair, Polly's wit and Polly's sweetness, few listeners
+remained quite unmoved and incurious. Among the many who were thus
+stirred to seek out this youthful paragon, was Miss Compton's
+brother-in-law, Mr. Horace Clapp. Nor was an idle curiosity his only
+motive in taking the step. Beneath the pretext he found for paying the
+visit lurked a rather shamefaced purpose of doing this "plucky little
+genius" a good turn.
+
+It happened, therefore, one morning in December, that Polly came home
+from her marketing to find a stranger sitting in her porch. A
+dog-cart, driven by a groom in livery, was passing and repassing her
+door; and one look at the occupant of the porch sufficed to fix the
+connection between the two. He was a well-dressed man of thirty or
+more, who rose as she opened the gate and saluted her as if she had
+been a duchess.
+
+"Miss Polly Fitch?" he inquired, as he stood before her, hat in hand.
+
+It was noticeable that no one ever omitted the "Polly" from the girl's
+name. It seemed as much a part of her as the ruddy hair and the dimple
+in her chin. That dimple, by the way, should have been mentioned long
+ago; but that, in its turn, was so essential a feature, that one would
+as soon think it necessary to state that Polly's nose had an upward
+tilt as that her chin had a dimple. Any one who had ever heard of
+Polly must know that her nose would tilt and her chin have a dimple.
+
+Polly had a large market-basket on her arm, and as she felt in her
+pocket for the key to the front door, her visitor took possession of
+the basket. She was a good deal impressed by the attention from so
+magnificent a personage, and one, moreover, of advanced years. She
+began to think that she must be mistaken about his being thirty; why,
+that was Cousin John's age, and Cousin John was quite an oldish man.
+She motioned her visitor to enter, and it must be admitted that there
+was no oppressive reverence in her tone as she said:
+
+"If you would tell me _your_ name, now we should be starting fair!"
+
+"My name is Horace Clapp. Did you ever hear of me?"
+
+"No, I don't think so. Ought I to have?"
+
+"Well, no, there's no obligation in the matter. I only had an idea
+that I was a local celebrity, like you."
+
+"Like me?"
+
+"Yes! You're a surprise to the town and so am I."
+
+"What have you done to surprise the town?" asked Polly, filled with
+curiosity.
+
+"I've only got rich very fast."
+
+"Why, so have I!" said Polly. "We _are_ a good deal alike."
+
+"Really? Then you will be in an even better position to advise me than
+I thought for."
+
+"I _supposed_ you had come for an idea," said Polly, as naturally as
+if her wares had consisted in tape and buttons.
+
+Offering her visitor the only fairly comfortable chair in the room,
+she seated herself by the window, near which was one of the draped
+barrels with her work-basket on top.
+
+"You won't mind my sewing, please," she said, picking up a bit of
+embroidery; "I can think better that way."
+
+The new customer meanwhile was wondering whether Miss Polly would
+guess that he had come partly from curiosity, and partly with that
+other far more daring motive of finding a way to do her a service.
+And yet, who could tell? Perhaps she _could_ give him a hint; perhaps
+she _was_ the youthful sibyl people seemed half inclined to believe
+her.
+
+"Miss Polly," he said, leaning forward in his chair, with his elbows
+on his knees,--"Miss Polly, I've got an awful lot of money, and I
+don't know what to do with it."
+
+Mere words had not often the power of staying Polly's needle, but at
+this astounding declaration she actually let her work fall in her lap,
+and gazed with wide-eyed wonder at the speaker.
+
+"Yes," he went on, "I really want to do some good with it, and I've
+tried in lots of ways and I've never hit it off. I should just like to
+tell you about some of the things I've made a fizzle of in the last
+year,--if it wouldn't bore you?"
+
+"Oh, no, it wouldn't bore me; nothing ever does. Only,--I can't
+understand it. Why, I think I could give away _a thousand dollars a
+year_ just there at home, where we used to live, and every dollar of
+it would be well spent!"
+
+"Yes, Miss Polly," he said very meekly, "but, you see, what I've got
+to consider is _two hundred thousand_ dollars a year!"
+
+He looked positively ashamed of himself, and Polly did not wonder. She
+had given a little gasp at mention of the sum; then she shook her head
+with decision. Polly knew her limits.
+
+"I haven't any ideas big enough for that" she said. "I should as soon
+think of advising the President of the United States!"
+
+"Well, if you won't advise me about mine, perhaps you will tell me
+what you are going to do with your own riches. You said you were
+getting rich, did you not? You know," he added, "it isn't necessary to
+make the map of a State as big as the State itself."
+
+"You have ideas, too," Polly remarked appreciatively, resuming her
+embroidery.
+
+"But you have not told me how you are going to use your riches."
+
+"Oh, I'm going to use mine for education."
+
+"Going up to the college?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, no; there'd be no good in my knowing a lot. I've been nearly
+through the Fieldham High School already, and the little that I've
+learned doesn't seem to stick very well. No, indeed! I'm going to--"
+she paused with a feeling of loyalty to Dan--"I'm only going to help
+on the general cause of education," she finished demurely.
+
+As she made this sphinx-like remark, Mr. Horace Clapp wished she would
+relinquish the pursuit of wealth long enough to put her work down and
+let him see exactly what she meant.
+
+"I think that is the best use to put money to," he said gravely, "but
+I'm not in the way of knowing about people who need help. Couldn't you
+tell me of somebody, some young man who wanted to go to college, or
+some girl who would like to go abroad? Of course, I could found a
+scholarship, or endow a 'chair,' but one likes a bit of the personal
+element in one's work."
+
+Polly's heart gave a thump. Here was a chance for Dan; a word from her
+was all that was needed to make his path an easy one. Had she a right
+to withhold that word,--to cramp and hinder him? She did not speak for
+a good many seconds; she simply plied her needle with more and more
+diligence, while her breath came fast and unevenly. Suddenly a furious
+blush went mounting up into her temples and spread itself down her
+neck. Her visitor thought he had never seen any one blush like that,
+and it somehow struck him that his little plan was swamped. Quite
+right he was, too. Polly blushed to think that she had thought of Dan
+in such a connection for a single instant.
+
+It was very unreasoning, this impulse of rebellious shame: are we not
+admonished to help one another? And what could the helpers do if all
+their benefactions were indignantly thrust back? Very unreasoning
+indeed, but natural!--natural as the colour of her hair and the
+quickness of her wit, natural as all the graces and virtues, all the
+misconceptions and foibles, that went to make up the personality of
+Polly Fitch,--of Polly Fitch, the daughter of Puritan ancestors; men
+and women who could starve, body and mind, but who never had learned
+to accept a charity.
+
+Before the flush had died away, Polly was quite herself again, and
+looked up so brightly and sweetly that Mr. Clapp took heart of hope.
+
+"You do know somebody like that; I'm sure you do!" he said
+insinuatingly.
+
+"I?" said Polly. "I know hardly anybody. But I'm sure the president of
+the college could tell you of a dozen boys who would be grateful for
+help."
+
+And so Mr. Horace Clapp's little plan had come to nought, and he took
+his leave more than ever convinced that it is a very difficult thing
+to spend one's money in a good cause. As he stood a moment, waiting
+for his dog-cart, a boy came down the street with a parcel under his
+arm.
+
+"Say, Mister, do you know whether Daniel Fitch lives here?" he asked.
+
+"Daniel Fitch?" thought Mr. Clapp, as the boy turned in at the gate.
+"Daniel Fitch? Where have I heard that name? Oh, yes, Beatrice said
+there was a brother; runs errands for Jones, the druggist. Plucky
+children! It would be pleasant to give them a lift!"
+
+As for Polly, she had not a twinge of regret. In fact, she rather
+enjoyed dwelling upon the splendour of the opportunity she had thrust
+from her, the better to glory in her escape. And she looked forward
+with entire confidence to the time when she should test Dan's feeling
+on the point.
+
+On Christmas Eve they hung up their stockings, fairly bulging with
+materialised jokes and ideas which the morning was to bring to light,
+and we may be sure that they did not wait for the lazy winter sun to
+put in an appearance before beginning their investigations. Amid
+shouts of merriment the revelations of a remarkably inventive Santa
+Claus were greeted, while Polly held her climbing excitement in check
+until the hour should be ripe for greater things. But when, at last,
+just as the sun was peeping in at the kitchen window, Dan's ferret
+fingers penetrated the extreme toe of his sock, she grew so agitated
+that she quite forgot to make a certain witty observation she had been
+saving up for that particular moment. And so it came about that an
+unwonted silence reigned as the unsuspecting Dan drew forth a small
+flat parcel labelled: "A Merry Christmas from Polly."
+
+Within was their familiar bank-book, wrapped about with a less
+familiar sheet of note-paper bearing the following inscription:
+
+"An Idea! Namely, to wit: That Daniel Reddiman Fitch, Esq., lay aside
+his character of Mercury, and become a student at Colorado College!
+
+"P. S.--An examination of the within balance will assure the said Dan
+that there is nothing to prevent his thus delighting the heart of his
+faithful Polly."
+
+A glance at the balance recorded, a reperusal of the "idea," and the
+impressive silence was broken into a thousand fragments.
+
+"For you see, Dan," Polly explained, when, at last, she had secured a
+hearing, "I shouldn't know what in the world to do with so much
+money,--some rich people don't, they say,--and I've got plenty of
+ideas to last us for years to come. Then, just as they begin to give
+out, you'll have got to be a mining engineer, with your pockets
+cram-full of money, and you'll have to support me for the rest of my
+life. So I don't see but that I'm getting the best of the bargain,
+after all!"
+
+It all seemed perfectly natural to Dan. This sister of his had always
+lent a hand when he needed it. Of course he would accept her help, and
+let the future, the glorious, inexhaustible future straighten out the
+account between them. He did not express himself even in his inmost
+thoughts in any such high-flown manner as this. He simply gave an
+Indian war-whoop, administered to Polly a portentous hug, and declared
+for the hundredth time, "Polly, you _beat the world!_"
+
+When everything was thus amicably settled and Dan had agreed to "give
+notice" in his capacity as Mercury, the following day, Polly said:
+"You won't mind being poor, will you, Dan? You don't wish we were
+rich, do you?"
+
+"Rich? Why, we _are_ rich!"
+
+"But, Dan, if any one came along and offered you a lot of money, say a
+thousand dollars a year, you wouldn't take it, would you?"
+
+"Do you mean a stranger, Polly, some one we hadn't any claim on?"
+
+"Yes; but somebody who had such a lot he wouldn't miss it. Would you
+take it, Dan? Say, would you take it?"
+
+"What a goose you are, Polly! Of course I wouldn't take it! I would
+rather go back to the Augaeans for the rest of my life!"
+
+On the evening of that momentous Christmas Day, our two young people
+had out their Latin books and began industriously to polish up their
+somewhat rusty acquirements in that classic tongue. A year ago they
+might not have regarded this as precisely a holiday pastime, but their
+ideas had undergone a great change since then.
+
+They sat at the little centre-table, the ruddy head and the black one
+close together in the lamp-light, reading their Cicero. A rap at the
+door seemed a rude interruption; yet so unusual was the excitement of
+an evening visitor that they could not be quite indifferent to the
+event,--the less so when the visitor proved to be Polly's client of
+the cumbrous income.
+
+"Good evening, Miss Polly," he called, from the door, and Polly
+fancied that his voice had a particularly cheerful ring in it. As he
+spoke, he glanced at Dan, who had opened the door.
+
+"This is my brother, Dan. Won't you come in, Mr. Clapp?"
+
+"With all the pleasure in the world, for I have come in the character
+of Santa Claus."
+
+"Have you indeed?" thought Polly to herself; "we'll see about that!"
+Perhaps there was something in her manner that betrayed her thoughts,
+for her visitor said, with evident amusement:
+
+"You take alarm too easily, Miss Polly. I should as soon think of
+offering a gift in my own name to,--to any other extremely rich young
+woman."
+
+"I was glad to hear that your brother's name was Dan," he continued
+with apparent irrelevance, as he took his seat. "And more delighted
+still when I found out his middle name. Didn't it strike you," he
+asked, turning abruptly to Dan, "that your employer, Mr. Jones, was
+developing rather a sudden interest in your antecedents?"
+
+"Yes," Polly thought, "he is pleased about something."
+
+"Why, yes," Dan answered, with boyish bluntness. "But what do you know
+about it?"
+
+"Only that it was I that put Jones up to making his inquiries."
+
+"You?" Dan looked half inclined to resent the liberty. But Polly saw
+that there was something coming.
+
+"Would you mind telling us what it's all about?" she asked. "You look
+as if you knew something nice."
+
+"I do; it's one of the nicest things I ever knew in my life. I didn't
+tell you the other day, did I, that I had made most of my money in
+mines?"
+
+"No," said Polly, wondering why he should want to tell them how he
+made "his old money."
+
+"Well, that is the case; nearly all in one mine, too. It's a great
+placer mine up north. I don't suppose you know much about placer
+mines?"
+
+Polly, disclaiming such knowledge, tried to look politely interested,
+while Dan's interest, fortunately for his manners, was very genuine.
+Was he not to be a mining engineer, and did he not want to learn all
+he could?
+
+"Well," Mr. Clapp went on, "a placer mine is one where the gold lies
+embedded in the soil and has to be washed out, and if there doesn't
+happen to be running water near by it costs an awful lot to bring it
+in."
+
+"Yes," said the polite Polly, with a vision of a fire-brigade running
+about with buckets in their hands, as they used to do in Fieldham.
+
+"What they call hydraulic mining," Dan put in.
+
+"Yes, that's it. Big ditches to be dug, and all that sort of thing.
+Well, this 'Big Bonus Mine' was discovered twenty years ago. A company
+was started and the stock was put on the market at a dollar a share.
+The management made a mess of it, as a management usually does, and it
+fizzled out. It was believed that the thing was chock-full of gold,
+but they couldn't get it out."
+
+Polly was beginning to be interested; she usually did find things
+interesting when she gave her mind to them.
+
+"Well, what did they do?" asked Dan.
+
+"They gave it up for a bad job, and tried to forget all the money they
+had put into it."
+
+"Then where did your money come from?"
+
+"Out of the 'Big Bonus Placer Gold Mine!' We scoop it right out
+to-day."
+
+"I wish you'd go ahead!" said Dan, for the guest had paused, and was
+examining the _Cicero_.
+
+"Well, hydraulic mining improves, like every thing else, and three
+years ago a new company was formed. Luckily the old company had not
+gone into debt; perhaps they could not borrow money on their elephant.
+However that may be, they agreed to put half their stock back into the
+treasury, and it was sold at fifty cents a share, which gave us money
+to work with."
+
+"And it was a howling success!" cried Dan. "I remember; I've heard all
+about it."
+
+"Yes, we've paid out two dollars a share in dividends in the last six
+months, and the stock is held at fifteen or sixteen dollars a share
+to-day. The beauty of it is," Mr. Horace Clapp added, glancing quietly
+from Dan to Polly, "I am convinced that you are both stockholders."
+
+"We?" they cried in a breath.
+
+"Yes! For Jones tells me that your father was a doctor; that his name
+was Daniel Reddiman Fitch, and that he once lived in Bington, Ohio."
+
+"Yes," said Polly; "that was when he was first married; before old
+Doctor Royce died, and left an opening in Fieldham, so that Father
+came back home again."
+
+"The name of such a stockholder stands on our books, but we haven't
+heretofore been able to trace him."
+
+"That's why old Jones pumped me so," Dan remarked, giving his mind
+first to the more familiar aspects of the case.
+
+"What a pity he never knew!" said Polly, with glistening eyes. "He was
+always so poor."
+
+"Your father's original holdings were five thousand shares, so that
+you are the possessors of twenty-five hundred shares. If you sell it
+pretty soon, as I think you may as well do, you will have something
+over forty thousand dollars to invest; for there is, in addition to
+the stock, five thousand dollars in back dividends due you."
+
+Dan and Polly looked at each other almost aghast; but that was only
+for a moment.
+
+"Why, Dan, you can have a saddle-horse of your own!" cried Polly.
+
+"And so can you!"
+
+"And we can--O Mr. Clapp, how rude we are!"
+
+Mr. Clapp looked as if it were a kind of rudeness that he was enjoying
+very much. As he rose to go, he said:
+
+"Don't you think I'm a pretty good sort of a Santa Claus after all,
+Miss Polly?"
+
+Polly seized his outstretched hand.
+
+"I didn't believe any one person could be so rich, and so good, too!"
+she declared.
+
+"And, O Dan!" cried Polly, the minute they were alone together, "let's
+send a New-Year's box home. There'll be just time enough. We can get
+one of those great carriage rugs for Uncle Seth, and a China silk for
+Aunt Lucia."
+
+"And I'll send Cousin John's boys some Indian bows and arrows."
+
+"And Cousin Martha a dozen Chinese cups and saucers."
+
+"And the old Professor a meerschaum pipe."
+
+"And Miss Louisa Bailey, and dear Mrs. Dodge, and the Widow
+Criswell,--what _shall_ we send the Widow Criswell, Dan?"
+
+"Some black-bordered pocket-handkerchiefs!" cried the irreverent Dan.
+
+Before going to bed they stepped out on the porch to bid the Peak
+good-night.
+
+"Going to be a fine day to-morrow, Polly."
+
+"All the days are fine in Colorado," said Polly.
+
+"You forget the blizzard last month."
+
+"Oh, but it was _such a dear blizzard_ not to do you any harm when it
+caught you out!"
+
+Dan grew thoughtful.
+
+"Do you ever think, Polly, that we should never have come out here if
+it hadn't been for you?"
+
+"You know it was 'Pike's Peak or bust!' with both of us, Dan."
+
+Dan looked critically from the great Peak, gleaming there in the
+starlight, to Polly's uplifted face, and then, as they turned to go
+in, he exclaimed, for the hundred-and-first time:
+
+"Polly, _you beat the world!_"
+
+
+
+
+NANNIE'S THEATRE PARTY
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+NANNIE'S THEATRE PARTY
+
+
+"Yes, my dear, I went to the the_ett_er myself once when I was quite a
+girl, younger 'n you be, I guess. 'Twas Uncle 'Bijah Lane that took
+me, 'n' he was so upsot by their hevin' a fun'ral all acted out on the
+stage, that he come home and told Ma 'twa'n't no fit place for young
+girls to go to, 'n' I ain't never ben inside a the_ett_er sence. Doos
+seem good to see play-actin' agin after all these years, I declare it
+doos!"--and Miss Becky took up her sewing, which she had laid down in
+a moment of enthusiasm.
+
+"If you liked it half as well as I like to do it, Miss Becky, you'd
+like it even better than you do now," replied Lady Macbeth, with a
+cheerful gusto, somewhat at odds with her tragic character.
+
+Nannie Ray, herself still very new to the delights of theatre-going,
+had recently seen a great actress play Lady Macbeth, and, fired with
+the spirit of emulation, she had been enacting the sleep-walking scene
+for the benefit of her country neighbour. Miss Becky Crawlin lived
+only half a mile down the road from the old Ray homestead, where the
+family were in the habit of spending six months of the year. She and
+Nannie had always been great cronies, Miss Becky finding a perennial
+delight in "that child's goin's on."
+
+The "child" meanwhile had come to be sixteen years old, but no one
+would have given her credit for such dignity who had seen the
+incongruous little figure perched upon the slippery haircloth sofa,
+twinkling with delight at Miss Becky's encomiums. She wore a
+voluminous nightgown, from under the hem of which a pink gingham
+ruffle insisted upon poking itself out; her long black hair hung over
+her shoulders in sufficiently tragic strands; her cheeks, liberally
+powdered with flour, gleamed treacherously pink through a chance
+break in their highly artificial pallor, while portentous brows of
+burnt cork did their best to make terrible a pair of very girlish and
+innocent eyes. A touch of realism which the original Lady Macbeth
+lacked was given by a streak of red crayon which lent a murderous
+significance to the small brown hand.
+
+"I declare!" her admiring auditor went on, stitching away to make up
+for lost time, "I can't see but you do's well's the lady I saw--only
+she was dressed prettier, and went round with a wreath on her head. A
+wreath's always so becomin'! We used to wear 'em May Day, when I was a
+girl. They was made o' paper flowers, all colours, so's you could suit
+your complexion, and when it didn't rain I must say we looked reel
+nice. 'Twas surprisin', though, how quick a few drops o' rain would
+wilt one o' them paper wreaths right down so's you could scurcely tell
+what 'twas meant for."
+
+"Tell me some more about the girl with the wreath, Miss Becky," said
+Lady Macbeth, longing to curl herself up in a corner, but too mindful
+of her tragic dignity to unbend.
+
+"Well, she looked reel pretty, but she didn't hev _sperit_ enough to
+suit my idees. She was kind o' lackadaisical and namby-pamby, 'n' when
+her young man sarsed her she didn't seem to hev nothin' to say for
+herself. I must say 'twas a heathenish kind of a play anyway, 'n' I
+ain't surprised that Uncle 'Bijah got sot agin it. The language wa'n't
+sech as I'd ben brought up to, either."
+
+Lady Macbeth had leaned forward and was clasping her knees, thus
+unconsciously widening the expanse of pink gingham visible beneath the
+white robe. She was glad she had modified her Shakespeare to suit her
+listener, though "Out, _dreadful_ spot!" was not nearly as
+bloodcurdling as the original.
+
+Miss Becky, meanwhile, had not paused in her narration.
+
+"There was a long-winded young man," she was saying, "him that sarsed
+his girl, 'n' he went slashin' round, killin' folks off in a kind of
+an aimless way, an'----"
+
+"It must have been _Hamlet_ that you saw!" cried Nannie, much excited.
+"Oh, I do so want to see _Hamlet_!"
+
+"Yes, _Hamlet_; that was it. And then there was a ghost in it that
+sent the shivers down my back; 'n' a king 'n' queen; 'n' the king
+looked for all the world like Deacon Ember, Jenny Lowe's grandpa, that
+died before you was born; 'n' I declare, I _did_ enjoy it! 'Twas jest
+like bein' alive in history times! Why, I ain't had sech shivers down
+my spine's the ghost give me, sence that day, till I seen you standin'
+there tryin' to wash your hands without any water, 'n' your eyes
+rollin' fit to scare the cat!"
+
+"Would you like to have me do it again for you, Miss Becky?" asked
+Nan, springing to her feet with renewed ardour. And straightway she
+stationed herself at the end of the little room and began propelling
+herself forward with occasional erratic halts.
+
+The September sunshine came slanting through the tiny panes of glass
+at the window, and touched with impartial grace the youthful figure
+of distracted mien, the worsted tidies on the haircloth sofa, and the
+neat alpaca occupant of the stuffed "rocker." Again the sewing was
+forgotten, and Miss Becky's glittering spectacles were fixed upon the
+tragic queen. As the queer little figure stalked solemnly down the
+room, eyes fixed in a glassy stare, hands wringing one another
+distressfully; as a moving wail rent the air, to the effect that "all
+the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand," a most
+agreeable succession of shivers made a highway of Miss Becky's spine.
+
+"Why don't you ever go to the theatre now, Miss Becky?" Nannie asked,
+when, having laid aside her tragic toggery, she came in her own person
+to take her leave. "I should think you'd like to go again."
+
+"Oh, yes, I should be reel tickled to go again, but I ain't got nobody
+to go with, and, well--there's other reasons besides."
+
+[Illustration: "All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little
+hand."]
+
+Nannie blushed to think how inconsiderate she had been to force her
+old friend to allude, even indirectly, to her poverty, and she walked
+up the dusty road to her own gate, filled with compunction. Just
+outside the gate was a little wilderness of goldenrod and asters. She
+thought what a pity it was they should get so gray with dust. Poor
+things, they could not help it; they had to stay where chance had
+planted them unless somebody picked them and carried them away, and
+even then they left their roots behind them. Somehow they made her
+think of Miss Becky, living her little narrow, stationary life all
+alone in the old tumble-down farmhouse. And just at this point in her
+reflections a delightful scheme came into her head.
+
+Now, Nannie was the recipient of a slender monthly allowance intended
+for gloves and ruchings, postage stamps, and the like, and, having
+spent the last four months far from the allurements of city shops, she
+happened at this juncture to be in funds. Her stock of gloves, to be
+sure, was pretty well exhausted, and Christmas was only a few months
+away. But Miss Becky was nearer still, and Nannie had no hesitation
+between the two claims. As a natural consequence it happened that,
+one pleasant day early in October, Miss Becky, in her best black
+bonnet, found herself steaming up to Boston, about to do Nannie "a
+real favour" by chaperoning her to the theatre. Miss Becky was so much
+impressed by the gravity of her responsibility that she hardly took in
+the fact that she was going to the theatre herself!
+
+They were to see _The Shaughraun_--a play which her best friend had
+assured Nannie was "just great"; and as the train rushed up to town
+the young hostess was at a loss to decide whether she was happier on
+her own account or on Miss Becky's. To be sure, she was just a little
+disappointed about Miss Becky, who seemed curiously silent and stiff;
+and when they came out of the station and walked up the crowded city
+street, the old lady held her by the sleeve and looked bewildered and
+frightened.
+
+"How long is it since you've been in Boston?" Nannie asked, looking up
+into the anxious old face framed in the black silk bonnet which
+looked twice as old-fashioned as ever before.
+
+"Not sence Sophia was married 'n' we came up to select her weddin'
+gownd. I was quite a girl then, an' I guess I felt more at home in a
+crowd than I do now. We don't often hev much of a crowd out our way."
+
+They were among the first to take their seats at the theatre. Mr. Ray
+had got places for them only three rows back from the stage, and, once
+established there, Nannie felt that they were in a safe haven, where
+her guest could grow calm and responsive again.
+
+At first Miss Becky was almost too overawed to speak, but after a
+while she got the better of the situation and began telling Nannie all
+about Sophia and her "true-so," and how they got lost on their way to
+the station and almost missed their train, which was the only train
+"out" in old times.
+
+"I do hope we sha'n't miss our train to-night, my dear! It doos seem's
+though we might 'f they don't begin pretty soon," and the old
+lady--for a very old lady she seemed to have become all of a
+sudden--fidgeted in her chair, and looked over her shoulder to see if
+the seats were not filling up.
+
+"We sha'n't lose our train, Miss Becky," Nannie assured her. "You know
+it doesn't go until half-past five o'clock, and the play is always
+over before five. And even if we did miss it we could take the
+seven-fifteen."
+
+"Oh, dear, no! I sh'd feel reel bad to miss the train. Why, it gits
+dark by six o'clock, 'n' 'twouldn't be safe for us to be goin' round
+the city streets after dark. We might git garroted or, or--_spoken
+to!_ Dear me! I _wish_ they would begin!"
+
+"If it gets late, Miss Becky, we won't wait for the end of the play,"
+said Nannie, while a very distinct pang seized her at thought of
+missing anything.
+
+"I think that _would_ be better!" Miss Becky cried, with evident
+relief. "Don't you think it might be better to go out a little early,
+anyway? They'll be such a crowd when everybody tries to go out to
+once that we might git delayed. _My!_ what a sight of people there is
+already! And up in the galleries, too! Ain't you 'most afeared to stay
+in sech a crowd?"
+
+"Oh, no, Miss Becky. It's just like this always, and nothing ever
+happens."
+
+"Them galleries don't look strong enough to hold many people. Why,
+Nannie, see! They ain't any _pillows_ under 'em! What do you suppose
+keeps 'em up?"
+
+"I don't know, I'm sure; but they're safe enough."
+
+At this point the orchestra struck up a popular tune and silence fell
+upon Miss Becky. She sat, stiff and severe, gazing straight before
+her, and when Nannie ventured to make a remark she received only a
+reproving look in reply.
+
+How strange it was, Nannie thought! She had meant to give Miss Becky
+such a treat, and here sat her guest, looking anxious and
+distressed--yes, more anxious and distressed than she looked a year
+ago when her cow died. But then the play had not begun yet, Nannie
+reflected, with a gleam of hope. When the play had once begun, Miss
+Becky would forget all her worries and be as "tickled" as she had
+counted on her being. And when once the curtain had gone up, Nannie at
+least had no more misgivings. Her fancy was instantly taken captive,
+first by the charming young officer and his pretty Irish sweetheart,
+then by the fine old priest, then by Con himself,--dear, droll,
+happy-go-lucky Con, with his picturesque foibles, his bubbling humour,
+and his phenomenal virtues. From the moment of his entry, with
+"Tatters" just not at his heels, Nannie was all smiles and tears.
+
+Miss Becky, meanwhile, sat erect as a ramrod, a look of perplexity
+screwing her wrinkles all out of shape. Her bonnet had got somewhat
+askew from her constant effort to keep an eye on those unsupported
+galleries, and there was a general air of discomfort about her, which
+was the first thing that struck Nannie when, as the curtain fell upon
+the first act, she turned to look at her.
+
+"Aren't you enjoying it, Miss Becky?" she asked, with quick anxiety.
+
+"Oh, yes, I'm hevin' a reel pleasant time. 'T ain't through yet, is
+it?"
+
+"Why, no; it's only just begun. There's lots more! May Colby says that
+Con gets them all out of all their troubles and almost gets killed
+himself!"
+
+"I sh'd think 't would take a long time. Are you sure 't ain't most
+five o'clock?"
+
+"Oh, no; it's only three. See! And my watch is fast, too. Wasn't it
+funny about the letter?"
+
+"Well, I didn't quite understand about that. What made 'em laugh so?"
+
+"Why, that was because he couldn't read, and so he had to make it all
+up out of his head."
+
+"Well!" declared Miss Becky, with strong disapproval, "I don't think
+he'd ought to hev deceived his mother that way; do you?"
+
+This was a poser; but at that moment the orchestra came to the rescue
+with a new tune, and Nannie was spared the necessity of replying.
+
+After that the play became every moment more exciting and the central
+figure more entirely captivating, and even between the acts Nannie
+was preoccupied and unobservant. They had got to the prison scene,
+with all its ingenious intricacies of plot and stage machinery; Con
+had accomplished the rescue, and was scrambling over the rocks, when
+suddenly the sharp report of a rifle rang out, followed by another,
+and then another, in quick succession.
+
+Instantly Nannie felt her arm clutched, and she heard Miss Becky
+saying: "You must come right away, this very minute!"
+
+"Oh, please not, Miss Becky," she implored.
+
+But there was a resolute gleam in Miss Becky's eye.
+
+"Come right along, child," she whispered, hoarsely, "come right along
+with me!"--and poor Nannie, to her consternation and chagrin, found
+herself absolutely obliged to follow.
+
+The whole row of people stood up to let them pass, and every kind of
+look--glances of amusement and curiosity, of annoyance and of
+sympathy--followed the oddly assorted pair, as they made their way
+out of the slip and then up the aisle.
+
+Once outside the door, the tension of Miss Becky's face relaxed, but
+she did not waver in her determination.
+
+"There, child!" she cried, as they walked down the slight incline of
+the long passageway to the street. "There! I am glad I had strength
+given me to do my duty by you!"
+
+"But, Miss Becky, there wasn't a bit of danger," Nannie protested,
+bravely keeping the tears back in her cruel disappointment. "Really,
+there wasn't. Won't you _please_ go back with me, and just stand
+inside the door and see the end of it? I'm sure they'd let us stand
+inside the door."
+
+"Nannie Ray," Miss Becky replied, looking very fiercely at the girl's
+flushed cheeks and imploring eyes, "if you knew as much about firearms
+as I do, you wouldn't ask such a thing. But there! It's jest because
+you're young and inexperienced that your ma wanted me to come and look
+after you. I guess she'll be thankful she was so foresighted when she
+hears of the danger you was in."
+
+In her exultation and relief of mind, Miss Becky marched on,
+regardless of jostling crowds and thronging teams. Her whole attitude
+had changed. She was no longer the timid, shrinking old woman; she was
+the responsible guardian, aware of the importance of her charge, and
+nothing was ever to convince her that she had not as good as saved
+Nannie's life on that occasion.
+
+Then Nannie, as became a hostess, accepted the situation with the best
+grace in the world.
+
+"I tell you what let's do, Miss Becky," she said. "Let's go and get
+some ice-cream. That is, if you like it."
+
+The stern old face relaxed.
+
+"Oh, yes; I like ice-cream, especially vanilla. But--do you think
+we've got time enough?"
+
+"We've got an hour and a quarter before the train goes. Let's come in
+here and get it."
+
+From the crowded street they passed in at the doorway and walked
+between marble counters to what seemed to Miss Becky a scene in
+fairyland. Ascending two or three broad steps, on each side of which
+an antlered stag kept guard, they stepped upon a great carpeted space,
+lighted from above,--a space in the middle of which was a fountain,
+springing high into the air, and splashing back into a round basin
+lined with shining shells and pebbles, over and among which goldfish
+swam and dove like animated jewels. Ferns and palms grew all about the
+basin, and in among the greenery was a little table where Nannie and
+her guest sat hidden safe away from the world.
+
+"Well, this doos beat all!" the old lady exclaimed, gazing at the
+fountain with an expression of rapt delight--just the expression that
+Nannie had counted upon seeing among the wrinkles.
+
+"Do you like it?" she asked, all her disappointment and chagrin
+forgotten.
+
+"Like it? Why, it's the most tasty place I was ever in! It's better
+than any play; it's like bein' in a play yourself! Jest see them
+pillows supportin' that gallery! 'N' them picters of tropical fruits!
+'N' this ice-cream! Why, it's different from what we hev at the
+Sunday-school picnics! 'Pears to me it's more creamy!"
+
+Now, at last, Miss Becky had lost all thought of the passage of time.
+She took her ice-cream, just a little at a time, off the tip-end of
+her spoon, and with every mouthful the look of content grew deeper.
+One of the little cakes that were served with the ice-cream was a
+macaroon with a sugar swan upon it--"a reel little statoo of a swan,"
+Miss Becky called it. She could not be persuaded to eat it, but she
+studied it with such undisguised admiration that Nannie ventured to
+suggest that she take it home with her. Again Miss Becky was
+enchanted. She wrapped it in her pocket-handkerchief, and placed it
+carefully in her reticule, whence it was to emerge only to enter upon
+a long and admired career as a parlour ornament.
+
+"And now, Miss Becky," Nannie queried, as they sat there embowered in
+palms and ferns, listening to the plash of the fountain, "didn't you
+enjoy the play at all?"
+
+"Oh, yes," said Miss Becky, "I had a very pleasant time before they
+got so reckless with their guns. But--I wonder whether they take sech
+pains with the the-etter's they used to? Why, when I went with Uncle
+'Bijah Lane that time, they all wore the most beautiful clothes. Even
+the men was dressed out in velvets and satins, and they wa'n't anybody
+on the stage that didn't make a good appearance."
+
+"But, you know, this was a different sort of play, Miss Becky. The
+folks in _The Shaughraun_ weren't kings and queens, but just every-day
+people."
+
+"Well, s'posin' they was! I don't see no excuse for that man Con goin'
+round lookin' so slack. I sh'd think he might at least git a whole
+coat to wear when he 'pears before the public!"
+
+"I'm afraid you're sorry you came," said Nannie, very meekly, feeling
+quite ashamed of her poor little party.
+
+"Oh, no, I ain't! Why, child, I'd hev come _barefoot_ to see this
+place here, with the founting a-splashin' and the fishes a-gleamin'!
+_Barefoot_, I tell ye!"
+
+It was a forcible expression, yet Nannie was not quite reassured. She
+still demurred.
+
+"But the play was the principal thing, you know."
+
+"The play? Well, I don't know," said Miss Becky, thoughtfully. "I
+don't know's I'm so terrible sot on the the_ett_er's I thought for.
+I'd a good deal ruther hev you come over 'n do that sleep-walkin'
+piece for me. I don't want nothin' better'n that. 'F I can see you act
+that once in a while, 'n' hev this here Garding of Eden to think
+about,--a founting playin' right in the house, 'n' all,--I ain't
+likely to want for amusement."
+
+The best bonnet was still very much askew, but the pleasant old face
+within, whose wrinkles had resumed their accustomed grooves, was
+irradiated with a look of unmistakable beatitude; and somehow it was
+borne in upon Nannie that her theatre party had been a success after
+all.
+
+
+
+
+OLIVIA'S SUN-DIAL
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+OLIVIA'S SUN-DIAL
+
+
+"It's all we need to make it the prettiest garden in Dunbridge."
+
+"Hm! And why must we have the prettiest garden in Dunbridge?"
+
+"Why shouldn't we?"
+
+Here was a deadlock--a thing quite shockingly out of place in a
+garden, and one's own particular garden at that!
+
+Olivia Page could make almost anything grow, as she had abundantly
+proved, but even her garden-craft could hardly suffice for the setting
+of a sun-dial on a pedestal of snow-white marble over there where the
+four triangular rose-beds converged to a circle, and where the south
+sun would play on it all day long.
+
+For a year Olivia had dreamed of this, and, since she was not a
+churlishly reticent young person, it was not the first intimation her
+father had received of her desire. Not until to-day, however, had she
+asked outright for what she wanted.
+
+"I wish you would say something more," she remarked, glancing sidewise
+at the professor's deeply corrugated countenance, which, for all their
+intimacy, was sometimes difficult to decipher. She had heard of girls
+who could twist their parents round their fingers; she wondered how
+they did it.
+
+The two were sitting on the white half-circle of a bench that stood at
+the west boundary of the old tennis-court, just where one end of the
+net used to be staked up. Excepting for that break, three sides of the
+garden were fenced in by the high wire screen originally designed to
+keep the tennis balls within bounds, and now doing duty as a trellis
+over which a luxuriant woodbine clambered, waving its reddening
+tendrils in the light September breeze. Wide flowerbeds bordered the
+entire court, the central turf being broken only by the cluster of
+rose-beds at the further end. From the white bench one looked across
+the grass to a broad flight of veranda steps, flanked on the right by
+a mass of white boltonia, while on the left a superb growth of New
+England asters reared their sturdy heads.
+
+The garden had been a great success this year, quite the admiration of
+the neighbourhood. Really, Papa must be proud of it, and it was all
+Olivia's doing. Who would ever guess that it had had its modest
+beginnings in half a dozen tin cracker-boxes with holes bored in the
+bottoms, where, in March, two years ago, she had planted queer little
+brown seeds as hard as pebbles, which Nature had straightway taken in
+hand, softening and expanding them down there in the dark, till they
+came alive, and began feeling their way up to meet the sun. Ah, the
+bliss of seeing those first tiny shoots turn into stems and leaflets,
+ready to play their part in the great spring awakening! Would Olivia
+ever love any flowers quite as she had loved those first seedlings,
+especially a certain pentstemon, which blossomed "white with purple
+spots," exactly as the seed-catalogue had promised?
+
+Yes, the garden was a great success, and just now it was at one of its
+prettiest moments, gay with autumn colours; the rudbeckia in its
+glory, and the great pink blossoms of the hibiscus spreading their
+skirts for all the world like ladies in an old-time minuet, while over
+yonder the soldier spikes of the flame-flower threatened to set the
+woodbine afire. Olivia loved the Latin names, but somehow "tritonia"
+did not seem to express those spikes of burning colour. And the roses!
+How lovely those late hybrids were! Why, the way that Margaret Dickson
+drooped her head above the pansies, still blooming freely at her feet,
+was enough to melt the heart of a Salem gibraltar! A pity that the
+professor's attention seemed for the moment to be riveted upon the toe
+of his boot!
+
+"I wish you would say something more," Olivia repeated.
+
+"Something different, you mean," and Doctor Page smiled, benignly and
+stubbornly.
+
+"For instance, you might tell me why you are opposed to it."
+
+"You wouldn't understand."
+
+"I might; you said, only the other day, that I sometimes displayed
+almost human intelligence!"
+
+The professor liked to have his jokes remembered; but still he seemed
+inclined to temporise.
+
+"I might say that we couldn't afford it. It is generally conceded that
+Alma Mater is not a munificent provider."
+
+"Yes; and you might say that my great-grandfather was not an East
+India trader--only you don't tell fibs."
+
+"Or that a sun-dial is an anachronism."
+
+"You are too good a Latin scholar for that."
+
+"So a subterfuge won't do? Very well; then you'll have to put up with
+a psychological proposition."
+
+"How interesting!"
+
+The professor glanced at the expectant young face turned toward him,
+and he could not but admit that his estimate of its owner's
+intelligence had been well within the truth.
+
+"You think a sun-dial would make it the prettiest garden in
+Dunbridge?"
+
+"I'm sure it would."
+
+"And that is what you are aiming at?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Now, I have noticed that when you have got what you are aiming at you
+lose interest in it."
+
+"O Papa!"
+
+"There was tennis," he went on, marking off the list on a combative
+forefinger, "and cookery; there was the Polyglot Club, and the
+Sketching Club, and----"
+
+"But, Papa! They were every one of them good things, and I got a lot
+out of them; truly, I did."
+
+"No doubt; but as soon as you could play tennis, or sketch a pine
+tree, or toss an omelette a little better than the other girls, you
+had squeezed your orange dry."
+
+"But, Papa! I've stuck to gardening for more than two years!" Olivia's
+tone seemed to give those years the dignity of centuries.
+
+"True; but you haven't got your sun-dial. You will consider that the
+finishing touch, and then before we know it you will be wanting to
+turn the whole thing into a sand-garden for the little micks at the
+Corners."
+
+"Not such a bad idea," Olivia admitted unguardedly.
+
+"There you are! The mere mention of a new scheme is enough to set you
+agog!"
+
+But this was not their first fencing match, and Olivia had learned to
+parry.
+
+"I thought you believed in people being open-minded," she ventured
+demurely.
+
+"And so I do; but not so open-minded that for every new idea that
+comes in an old one goes out."
+
+"Oh, the sun-dial hasn't got away yet," she laughed, springing to her
+feet and going over to the court-end of the garden, where she placed
+herself in the exact centre of the converging rose-beds.
+
+"There!" she cried; "don't you see how my white gown lights up the
+whole place? It's just the high light that it needs."
+
+And so it was: a fact of which no one was better aware than the
+professor. As he, too, rose and sauntered toward the house he could
+not deny that Olivia's ideas were usually good. The only trouble was
+that she had too many of them; and here was the kernel of truth that
+gave substance to his whimsical argument. The beauty of the garden was
+not lost upon him, nor yet the skill and industry of the young
+gardener. But more important than either was the advantage to the
+girl's health. Olivia was sound as a nut; of course she was! There
+could be no doubt of that. But--so had her mother seemed, until that
+fatal winter ten years ago. He did not fear for Olivia; why should he?
+Only--well, this out-of-door life was a capital thing for anybody. No,
+he could not have her tire of her garden.
+
+At the foot of the veranda steps Dr. Page paused and glanced again at
+his daughter. She had left the rose-beds and was already intent upon
+her work, pulling seeds from the hollyhocks over yonder. She made a
+pretty picture in her white gown, standing shoulder-high among the
+brown stalks, her slender fingers deftly gleaning from such as showed
+no rust. The child was really very persistent about her gardening; she
+had fairly earned an indulgence. Perhaps, after all, she might be
+trusted. He moved a few steps toward her.
+
+"Olivia," he said,--and the first word betrayed his relenting,--"Olivia,
+your sun-dial scheme is not such a bad idea. I should rather like that
+white-petticoat effect myself. Supposing we say that if between now and
+next June you don't think of anything you want more, we'll have it."
+
+"Oh, you blessed angel! What could I want more?"
+
+"Time will show," the blessed angel replied, retracing his steps
+toward the house--unaided by angelic wings!
+
+"Yes," Olivia called confidently. "It's the sun-dial that time will
+show, and afterward--why, the sun-dial will show the time!"--and
+although he made no sign, she knew there were little puckers of
+amused approval about her father's mouth.
+
+As if she could ever want anything more than a sun-dial! she thought,
+while she passed along the borders, harvesting her little crop. She
+had finished with the hollyhocks, and now she was bending over a bed
+of withered columbines. And there were the foxglove seeds still
+clinging. Really, it was almost impossible to keep up. How brilliant
+the salvia was to-day, and what a brave second blossoming that was of
+the delphinium, its knightly spurs, metallic blue, gleaming in the
+sun!
+
+"No," she declared to herself, "there will never be anything so much
+worth while as the garden. Why, of course there won't; because Nature
+is the best thing in the world--the very best."
+
+"Plase, ma'am, will ye gimme a bowkay?"
+
+Olivia turned, startled by a voice so near at hand, for she had heard
+no footfall on the thick turf. There, in the centre of the grass-grown
+space, stood two comical little midgets, their smutty yet cherubic
+faces blooming brightly above garments highly coloured and earthy,
+too, as the autumn garden-beds.
+
+[Illustration: "Please ma'am, will ye gimme a bowkay?"]
+
+"Dear me!" Olivia laughed, "how things do sprout in a garden! Did you
+come right up out of the ground?"
+
+"Plase, ma'am, a bowkay! Me mudder's sick an' me fader's goned away."
+
+The speaker, a boy of five, stood holding by the hand something in the
+way of a sister, about two sizes smaller. At Olivia's little joke,
+which they did not in the least understand, they had both grinned
+sympathetically, showing rows of diminutive teeth as white and even as
+snow-berries.
+
+"Bless your little hearts, of course you shall have a bouquet! Come
+and choose one,"--and taking a hand of each Olivia led them slowly
+along the brilliant borders.
+
+They were a bit shy at first, but they soon picked up their courage,
+and Patsy fell to accumulating a mass of incongruous blossoms whose
+colours fought each other tooth and nail. Little Biddy, more modest,
+as beseemed her inferior rank in the scale of being, fixed her heart
+upon a single flame-flower which absolutely refused to reconcile
+itself with the ingenuous pink of her calico frock.
+
+"How long has your mother been ill?" Olivia asked of the boy, who by
+this time was quite hidden behind a perfect forest of asters and
+larkspur and lobelia cardinalis.
+
+"Me mudder's always sick. She coughs an' coughs, and den she lays on
+de bed long whiles."
+
+"And she likes flowers?"
+
+"Yes, ma'am; me an' Biddy picked a bowkay outen a ashba'l oncet, an'
+me mudder sticked it in a tumbler an' loved it. Come, Biddy, make de
+lady a bow!" Upon which the small Chesterfield stood off a few steps
+and gave an absurd little bob of a bow which Biddy gravely endeavoured
+to imitate.
+
+"I think I'll go with you," said Olivia, open-minded as ever to a new
+interest; and hand in hand and chattering amicably, the three moved
+across the turf and down the long gravel walk to the dusty street.
+Surprising how short the distance was between the sweet seclusion of
+the old tennis-court and the squalid quarter where these little human
+blossoms grew!
+
+Olivia was thinking of that as she stood on the veranda an hour later,
+looking down upon the flowery kingdom to which all her interest and
+ambition had been pledged. Yes, it was lovely, lovely in the long
+afternoon light, and it would have been lovelier still with the
+gleaming marble she had dreamed of. She really tried to keep her mind
+upon it, to forget the little drama over there in the stuffy tenement.
+But no; she was too good a gardener for that. Was not a whole family
+broken and wilting for lack of means to transplant it?
+
+The doctor had ordered Mrs. O'Trannon to Colorado, and Mike had
+dropped his work as "finisher"--whatever that might be--and had gone
+out to prepare the way for the others to follow. He had found no
+chance to work at his trade, but he had got a job on a ranch, where
+the pay was small, but the living good. A fine place it would be for
+the invalid and the children, when once he could get together the
+money to send for them. But meanwhile here they were, and the winter
+coming on.
+
+As Olivia stood looking down upon her beloved garden, she could not
+seem to see anything but brown stalks and dead blossoms. All that
+lavish colour looked fictitious and transitory; she had somehow lost
+faith in it.
+
+Mrs. O'Trannon had been pleased with the flowers; she had grown up on
+a farm, she said. Sure she never'd ha' got sick at all if she'd ha'
+stayed where she belonged. But then, where would Mike have been, and
+the babies? And where would Mike be, and the babies, Olivia thought
+with a pang,--where would they be if the mother wilted and died? She
+turned, suddenly, and passed in at the glass doors and on to her
+father's study.
+
+At sight of the kind, quizzical face lifted at her entrance, Olivia
+winced a bit. About an hour and a half it must be, since he said it,
+and he had given her a year! As if that made any difference! she told
+herself, with a little defiant movement of the chin, as she crossed
+the room and seated herself at the opposite side of the big
+writing-table where she could face the music handsomely.
+
+"Well, Olivia; changed your mind yet?" the professor inquired, struck,
+perhaps, by the resolution of her aspect.
+
+"Yes," she answered, in an impressive tone, "I've thought of something
+I should prefer to a sun-dial."
+
+Dr. Page took off his glasses and laid them upon his open book. He did
+not really imagine that she was serious--such a turn-about-face was
+too precipitate even for Olivia; but it pleased him to meet her on her
+own ground.
+
+"And what is it this time? A sixty-inch telescope? Or a diamond
+tiara?"
+
+"Well, no. Those are things I had not thought of--before! It's a kind
+of gardening project--a little matter of transplanting."
+
+"Will it cost a hundred and fifty dollars?"
+
+"About that, I should think, to do it properly and comfortably.
+And--it can't wait till June. It's the kind of transplanting that has
+to be done in the autumn."
+
+Then, dropping the little fiction, and resting her chin upon her
+folded hands, the better to transfix her father's mocking
+countenance,--"Papa," she said, "there's a poor family down at the
+Corners,--our neighbours, you know,--and the mother is dying for want
+of transplanting, just like the beautiful hydrangea--you
+remember?--that I didn't understand about till it was too late. I
+never knew what too late meant, till I saw that splendid great bush
+lying stone-dead on the ground when we came home from the Adirondacks
+last year. A great healthy hydrangea dying just for lack of the right
+kind of soil! And now, here is this good human woman, that might live
+out her life and bring up her little family, and be happy and useful
+for years to come. Such a nice woman she must be to name her babies
+Patsy and Biddy, when she might have called them Algernon and
+Celestina, you know, and just spoiled it all!--and such a nice, kind
+husband to take care of her on a big ranch where there's good air,
+and lots to eat, and plenty of work and not too much, and--why Papa!
+they might have a garden out there! who knows? What a thing that would
+be for the prairie! A real New England garden!"
+
+"With a sun-dial?" the professor interposed.
+
+For an instant Olivia's face fell, but only for an instant.
+
+"I've been thinking," she said, with a very convincing seriousness,
+"that perhaps a sun-dial is not so important, after all. At any rate
+it's not so important as the mother of a family; now, is it, Papa?"
+
+"That depends upon the point of view," the professor opined. "As a
+high light among the rose-bushes I should be constrained to give my
+vote for the sun-dial."
+
+Olivia sprang to her feet.
+
+"That means that you are coming straight over with me to see Mrs.
+O'Trannon," she cried, "and that you are going to have the whole
+family packed off to Colorado quicker'n a wink! Come along, please!
+There's plenty of time before dinner!"
+
+                  *       *       *       *       *
+
+"It's just another of Nature's miracles!" Olivia observed, as she and
+her father stood one morning in late October watching the workmen pack
+the sods about the beautiful pedestal, now securely planted upon its
+base of cement and broken stone. "It always makes me think of the
+wonderful things that came up in those tin cracker-boxes you used to
+make such fun of. There really doesn't seem to be any place too
+unlikely for Nature to set things going in."
+
+The marble was but roughly hewn, in lines that held the suggestion of
+an hourglass. The top only was smoothly finished, while here and there
+on the curving sides the hint of a leaf, a blossom, a trailing vine,
+came and went with the point of view, like cloud-pictures or the
+pencillings of Jack Frost. It was as if a 'prentice-hand had tried to
+express the soul of an artist, too self-distrustful to work more
+boldly.
+
+"Funny, how things come into your head," Olivia went on. "Do you know,
+Papa, that day when I was helping Mrs. O'Trannon with her preposterous
+packing and suddenly came upon this miracle hidden away under an old
+bedquilt, the only thing I could think of was the way my first
+pentstemons came out, 'white with purple spots,' exactly as I had
+chosen them by the seed-catalogue. And to think that she had bought it
+for a dollar of that poor stone-cutter's widow that was moving
+out--bought it to make pastry on because the top was smooth and cold!
+And then had never had time to make but one pie in the three years! I
+wish you could have heard her tell about it. 'Faith, it cost me a
+dollar, me one pie did, an' Mike says it's lucky it was that I didn't
+make a dozen whin they come so high! Silly b'y, that Mike!' O Papa,
+isn't it heavenly that they're together again?"
+
+"So you think there is nothing Nature can't do?" Dr. Page mused, with
+apparent irrelevance. "How about the sun-dial itself?"
+
+"Oh, Nature will attend to that, too."
+
+"She will, will she? And in what particular tin cracker-box should you
+look for it to come up?"
+
+"It wouldn't be polite to say," Olivia declared, looking with
+unmistakable significance straight into her father's face.
+
+"Saucebox!" he chuckled.
+
+And when, in early June, the brass disk of the sun-dial had begun its
+record of happy hours, and still Olivia toiled with unabated zeal at
+her garden, the rose of health blooming ever brighter in her face, a
+great sense of satisfaction and approval took possession of her
+father's mind. But he only remarked, in a casual manner, as they sat
+together on the white bench one fragrant sunset hour:
+
+"After all, I'm not sure but Nature's biggest miracle has been
+performed in the saucebox."
+
+And Olivia, smiling softly, answered: "I told you, you know, that
+there isn't any place too unlikely for Nature to set things going
+in!"
+
+
+
+
+BAGGING A GRANDFATHER
+
+
+"I'll warrant that 'he, she, or it' will come! Di usually bags her
+game!"
+
+The speaker, Mr. Thomas Crosby, must have had implicit faith in his
+daughter's prowess to venture such a confident assertion as that, for
+he was quite in the dark as to who "he, she, or it" might be.
+
+It was a cozy November evening, when open fires and friendly
+drop-lights are in order, and the three grown-folks of the family were
+enjoying these luxuries. Mr. Crosby was supposed to be reading his
+paper, but he had a sociable way of letting fall an occasional item of
+interest, or of letting fall the paper itself, at the first hint of
+interest in the remarks of his wife and daughter.
+
+Only within a very short time had there been three grown-folks in the
+family, unless, indeed, we count Rollo, the Gordon setter, who had
+attained his majority years ago. Di, who was but just turned sixteen,
+really did not like to remember how very recently she had been sent to
+bed at eight o'clock!
+
+Could Mr. Crosby have guessed the scheme which was occupying the
+active brain of the young person engaged in embroidering harmless
+bachelor's buttons upon a linen centrepiece, he would have been very
+much astonished,--whether pleasurably or otherwise, events alone must
+show. And since events had been taken in hand by Di the revelation was
+not likely to be long delayed.
+
+The incident which had elicited her father's declaration of confidence
+was a request on Di's part to be allowed the privilege of inviting a
+guest of her own choosing to the Thanksgiving dinner. The family party
+was to be materially reduced this year, for Mrs. Crosby's mother and
+sister, their only available relatives, were at that moment sojourning
+in Rome, where, if they were sufficiently mindful of current maxims
+to do as the Romans do, they were very unlikely to meet with any
+satisfactory combination of turkey and plum-pudding. It was with that
+fact in view, that Di felt a fair degree of assurance in preferring
+her request. They all liked each other, of course, better than they
+liked anybody else, but, really, one must do something a little out of
+the common on Thanksgiving day.
+
+"Certainly," Di's mother had agreed; "you shall invite any one you
+choose. I have been wishing we could think of some one to ask, but
+people all have their own family parties on Thanksgiving day. Is it to
+be one of your girl friends?"
+
+"That is my secret," Di had replied, sedately; "but, whoever it is,
+he, she, or it is a very important personage, and will have to be
+treated with great consideration!"
+
+"And how is that very _un_important personage, Di Crosby, going to get
+hold of so great a dignitary?" Mrs. Crosby had laughingly inquired. At
+which juncture Mr. Crosby had expressed his belief that Di would bag
+her game.
+
+That the prospective dinner should be incomplete was all the harder,
+considering the fact that the Crosbys were, by good rights, the
+possessors of that most desired ornament of such an occasion,--a _bona
+fide_ grandfather. Not only was old Mr. Crosby living, and in
+excellent health, but his residence was not above a dozen blocks
+removed from his son's house. And yet no grandfather had ever graced
+their Thanksgiving feast.
+
+Family quarrels are an unpleasant subject at the best, and since Di
+herself had never learned the precise cause of the long estrangement
+between father and son, in which the old gentleman had decreed that
+his son's wife and children should share, it is hardly worth while to
+recount it here. Suffice it to say, that it was a very old quarrel
+indeed, older than Di herself, and one to which Mr. and Mrs. Crosby
+never alluded.
+
+It was six years ago, when Di, the eldest of the children, was ten
+years of age, that she had come home from school one day, breathless
+with excitement.
+
+"Mamma!" she cried, bursting into the room where her mother was
+changing the baby's frock: "Mamma! Have I got a grandfather?"
+
+Mrs. Crosby glanced furtively at the round eyes of the baby, and took
+the precaution of smothering him in billows of white lawn before
+replying, rather softly: "Yes, dear; Papa's father is living. Why do
+you ask?"
+
+"I saw him to-day."
+
+"You saw him? Where?"
+
+"On the street."
+
+"How did you know it was he?"
+
+"Sallie Watson asked me why I didn't bow to my grandfather."
+
+"And what did you say?"
+
+"I said: 'Never you mind!' And then I ran home all the way, as tight
+as ever I could run! Mamma, why don't we ever see him?"
+
+The baby's head was just emerging from temporary eclipse, and Mrs.
+Crosby's voice dropped still lower, as she answered:
+
+"Because, dear, _he doesn't wish it_."
+
+There was something so gently conclusive in this answer that little Di
+was silenced. Yet the look in her mother's face had not escaped her; a
+wistful, hurt look, such as the child had never seen there before. And
+in her own mind Di asked many questions.
+
+What did it all mean? How did it happen that her grandfather did not
+wish it? Why was he so different from other girls' grandfathers? There
+must be something very wrong somewhere, but where was it? Since it
+could not possibly be with her father or mother, it must be that her
+grandfather was himself at fault.
+
+The object of Di's perplexities, Mr. Horatio Crosby, lived all alone
+in a very good house, and was in the habit of driving about in a very
+pretty victoria; people bowed to him, people who were friends of Di's
+father and mother, and must therefore be creditable acquaintances. All
+this she soon discovered, for, having once come to know her
+grandfather by sight, she seemed to be constantly crossing his path.
+
+Little by little, as she grew older, Di picked up certain stray bits
+of information, but she never tried to piece them together. She felt
+that she would a little rather not know any more. A quarrel there had
+certainly been, some time in the dark ages before she was born, and
+the old man had proved himself obstinate and implacable. Friendly
+overtures had been made from time to time, but he had set his face
+against all such advances, and now, for many, many years,--as many as
+three or four, little Di had gathered,--the friendly overtures had
+ceased.
+
+One gets used to things, and Di got used to having a grandfather who
+did not know her by sight. She was sure he did not know her, because
+once, when she was twelve years old, he had stopped her on the street
+to tell her that she had dropped her pocket-handkerchief. It had been
+very polite of the old gentleman, and she had been glad not to lose
+her handkerchief. Yet, as she thanked him, she gave him one searching
+look, and she told herself that he had a very cross expression, as
+well as a very harsh voice.
+
+This uncomplimentary verdict was largely due to the fact that, at this
+period, Di had quite made up her mind that her grandfather was a
+hateful, unreasonable old despot, and that it served him right never
+to come to the family parties, nor to have any Christmas presents, nor
+to have seen the baby, which Mamma said was the prettiest of all her
+babies, and which Di considered the most enchanting object on the face
+of the earth.
+
+But again many years had passed,--four, in this instance,--and there
+came a time, only a few weeks previous to the opening of our story,
+when Di found herself constrained to modify her view of her
+grandfather.
+
+It happened that she had gone with her drawing teacher, Miss Downs, to
+an exhibition of paintings. Among the pictures was a very striking one
+entitled _Le Grandpere_. It represented an old French peasant, just
+stopping off work for the day, with a flock of grandchildren clinging
+about his knees. Miss Downs called Di's attention to the wonderful
+reach of upland meadow, and the exquisite effect of the sunset light
+on the face of the old man; but, to Di, the meadow and the sunset
+light were unimportant accessories to the central idea. It was the
+grandfather himself that commanded all her attention,--the look of
+blissful indulgence on the old man's face; his attitude of protecting
+affection towards one young girl in particular, on whose head the
+toil-stained hand rested.
+
+"Yes," she said, after several minutes of rapt contemplation: "Yes;
+the sunset is very nice, and the fields; but, oh, the old man is such
+a darling!"
+
+As she spoke she turned to see how her teacher took her remark, and
+found herself face to face, not with Miss Downs, but with her own
+grandfather! She gave a little gasp of surprise, which he appeared not
+to notice.
+
+"So you think him a darling, do you?" he asked, and somehow his voice
+did not sound quite as harsh as it had done four years ago.
+
+Miss Downs had passed on, and there was no one standing near them, no
+one at all in the gallery who shared Di's knowledge of the strange
+situation. She felt sure that the old man had no suspicion of her
+identity.
+
+"Yes, I do," she answered boldly.
+
+"What makes a darling of him?" the old gentleman inquired.
+
+Di felt that this was her opportunity, and that she was letting it
+slip. But she could not help herself, and she only answered rather
+lamely:
+
+"Oh, nothing, except that he is _such a good grandfather!_" Upon which
+she beat a hasty retreat, and fled to the protection of Miss Downs,
+whom she found in an adjoining room.
+
+It was perhaps twenty minutes later that Di and her teacher passed the
+picture again, and, behold, there was the old gentleman standing, lost
+in thought, exactly on the spot where she had left him. He did not
+seem to be looking at the picture, but Di felt certain that he was
+thinking of it. And, suddenly, it passed through her mind like a flash
+that he was sorry.
+
+"Yes; he's sorry," she said to herself. "He's sorry, and he doesn't
+know how to say so!"
+
+The more she thought of it in the days that followed,--and she seemed
+to be thinking pretty much all the time of the old man and the look on
+his face as he stood before the picture,--the more convinced she
+became that he was sorry and did not know how to say so.
+
+"And he ought not to have to say so," she told herself. "He's an old,
+old man, and he ought not to have to say that he is sorry."
+
+The old, old man--aged sixty-five--might have taken exception to that
+part of her proposition touching his extreme antiquity, but we may be
+pretty sure that he would have cordially endorsed her opinion that the
+dignity of his years forbade his saying that he was sorry.
+
+In those days Di used to walk often past her grandfather's house. It
+was a very big house for a single occupant. Even the stout footman,
+whom she had once seen at the door, did not seem stout enough, nor
+numerous enough to relieve the big house of its vacancy. There were
+heavy woollen draperies in the parlor windows, but not a hint of the
+pretty white muslin which a woman would have had up in no time. Once
+she passed the house just at dusk, after the lights were lighted.
+Through the long windows she looked into the empty room. Not so much
+as a cat or a dog was awaiting the master. In the swift glance with
+which she swept the interior she noted that the fireplace was boarded
+in. That seemed to Di indescribably dreary. Perhaps her grandfather
+did not sit here; perhaps he had a library somewhere, like their own.
+But, no; there was the portly footman entering with the evening paper,
+which he laid upon the table before coming to close the shutters.
+
+"He's too old to say he is sorry," Di said to herself, as she turned
+dejectedly away; "a great deal too old--and lonely--and dreary!"
+
+And it was on that very evening that she made her little petition to
+her mother, and that her father declared that Di was sure to bag her
+game.
+
+Old Mr. Crosby, meanwhile, was too well-used to his empty house and to
+his boarded-in fireplace to mind them very much, too unaccustomed to
+muslin curtains to miss them. Yet he had not been on very good terms
+with himself for the past few weeks, and that was something which he
+did mind particularly.
+
+The result of his long cogitation in front of the grandfather picture
+had been highly uncomplimentary to the artist. He pronounced the
+homespun subject unworthy of artistic treatment, and he told himself
+that it merited just that order of criticism which it had received at
+the hands of the young person with the rather pretty turn of
+countenance, who had regarded it with such enthusiasm. Nevertheless,
+he did not forget the picture,--nor yet the young person!
+
+It was the afternoon of Thanksgiving day, and there was a light fall
+of snow outside. He remembered that in old times there used always to
+be a lot of snow on Thanksgiving day. Things were very different in
+old times. He wondered what would have been thought of a man fifty
+years ago,--or seventeen years ago, for the matter of that,--who was
+giving his servants a holiday and dining at the club. As if those
+foreign servants had any concern in the Yankee festival! But then,
+what concern had he, Horatio Crosby, in it nowadays? What had he to be
+thankful for? Whom had he to be thankful with? He was very lucky to
+have a club to go to! He might as well go now, though it was still two
+or three hours to dinner time. He would ring for his overcoat and
+snow-shoes.
+
+His hand was on the bell-rope--for Mr. Horatio Crosby was
+old-fashioned, and had never yet admitted an electric button to his
+domain.
+
+At that moment the door opened softly--what was Burns thinking of, not
+to knock?--and there stood, not Burns, not Nora, but a slender
+apparition in petticoats, with a dash of snow on hat and jacket, and a
+dash of daring in a pair of very bright eyes.
+
+"Good afternoon, Grandfather," was the apparition's cheerful greeting,
+and involuntarily the old gentleman found himself replying with a
+"Good afternoon" of his own.
+
+The apparition moved swiftly forward, and, before he knew what he was
+about, an unmistakable kiss had got itself applied to his countenance
+and--more amazing still--he was strongly of the impression that there
+had been--no robbery!
+
+Greatly agitated by so unusual an experience, he only managed to say:
+"So you are----?"
+
+"Yes; I am Di Crosby,--your granddaughter, you know, and--this is
+Thanksgiving day!"
+
+"You don't say so!" and the old man gazed down at her in growing
+trepidation.
+
+"Let's sit down," Di suggested, feeling that she gained every point
+that her adversary lost. "This must be your chair. And I'll sit here.
+There! Isn't this cozy?"
+
+"Oh, very!"
+
+The master of the house had sufficiently recovered himself to put on
+his spectacles, the use of which was affording him much satisfaction.
+He really did not know that the young girl of the day was so pretty!
+
+"I don't suppose you smoke a pipe," Di remarked, in a strictly
+conversational tone.
+
+"Well, no; I can't say I do. Why?"
+
+"I only thought I should like to light one for you. You know," she
+added, confidentially, "girls always light their grandfathers' pipes
+in books. And I've had so little practice in that sort of thing!"
+
+"In pipes?"
+
+"No--in grandfathers!"
+
+There came a pause, occupied, on Di's part, by a swift, not altogether
+approving survey of the stiff, high-studded room. This time it was the
+old gentleman who broke the silence.
+
+[Illustration: "'Good afternoon, Grandfather,' was the apparition's
+cheerful greeting."]
+
+"I believe you are the young lady who admired that old clodhopper in
+the picture," he remarked.
+
+"Oh, yes; he was a great darling!"
+
+"He wasn't very handsome."
+
+"No, but--there is always something so dear about a grandfather!"
+
+"Always?"
+
+"Yes; always!" and suddenly Di left her seat, and, taking a few steps
+forward, she dropped on her knees before him.
+
+"Grandfather," she said, clasping her small gloved hands on his knee,
+"Grandfather!"
+
+She was meaning to be very eloquent indeed,--that is, if it were to
+become necessary. She did not dream that that one word, so
+persuasively spoken, was more eloquent than a whole oration.
+
+"Well, Miss Di?"
+
+"Grandfather, I've a great favour to ask of you, and I should like to
+have you say 'yes' beforehand!"
+
+He looked down upon her with a heart rendered surprisingly soft by
+that first word,--and a mind much tickled by the audacity of the rest
+of it.
+
+"And are you in the habit of getting favours granted in the dark?" he
+inquired.
+
+"Papa says I usually bag my game!"
+
+Now old Mr. Crosby had been a sportsman in his day, and he was
+mightily pleased with the little jest. But he only asked:
+
+"And what's your game in this instance, if you please?"
+
+"You!"
+
+"Oh, I! And you want to bag me? Bag me for what?"
+
+"For dinner!"
+
+"Oh, for dinner!"
+
+"Yes! We are all by ourselves to-day, and you'll just make the table
+even. There's only Papa and Mamma, and Louise, and Beth, and Alice,
+and the baby." Somehow the succession of sweet, soft names sounded
+very attractive to the crabbed old man.
+
+"The baby is six years old," Di continued, unconsciously adding
+another touch to the attractiveness of the picture.
+
+"And what is her name?"
+
+"_His_ name is Horatio. I never liked it very well; it seemed too long
+for a baby. But, do you know?--I think I shall like it better now."
+
+She was still kneeling before him, with her small gloved hands clasped
+on his knee. It was clear that she had not the faintest idea of being
+refused. Yet even had she been somewhat less confident, she might well
+have taken heart of hope, for, at this point, he gently laid his
+wrinkled hand upon hers.
+
+"You _will_ come to dinner?" she begged, apparently quite unconscious
+of the little caress. "We dine at five on Thanksgiving day, and you
+and I can walk over together. They will all be so surprised,--and so
+happy!"
+
+"Then they are not expecting me?" and the old man gave her a very
+piercing look, which did not seem to pierce at all.
+
+"No; they didn't know who it was to be. I only said it was a very
+important personage."
+
+"Coming in a bag!" he suggested.
+
+"Oh, that's only a sportsman's expression!"
+
+"Indeed! And is it customary nowadays to go a-hunting for your
+Thanksgiving dinner?"
+
+Di's eyes danced. This was indeed a grandfather worth waiting for! But
+she only answered demurely:
+
+"That depends upon your quarry!"
+
+Lucky Di, to have hit upon that pretty, old-fashioned word! She had,
+indeed, read her Sir Walter to good purpose.
+
+Now, Mr. Horatio Crosby had held out stoutly against every appeal of
+natural affection, of reason, of conscience. He was not a
+quick-tempered man like his son; he was not, like his daughter-in-law,
+easily rebuffed; but there was about him a toughness of fibre which
+yielded neither to blows nor to pressure, and which, for many years,
+neither friend nor foe had penetrated. And here was this young thing
+simply ignoring the hitherto impenetrable barrier! The clear young
+eyes looked straight through it, the fresh young voice made nothing of
+it, the playful fancies overleapt it. A quarry, indeed! Where had the
+child got hold of the word?
+
+Of a sudden the old man bent forward and lightly touched the laughing
+face in token of surrender.
+
+"It's an old bird you've winged, little girl," he said, as he rose to
+his feet and stepped once more to the bell-rope; and this time he
+really rang for his coat and overshoes.
+
+                  *       *       *       *       *
+
+"And so you've named this little chap Horatio?"
+
+Dinner was over,--a very pleasant, natural kind of dinner, too, in
+spite of the difficulty some of the family had found in eating
+it,--and they were all gathered about a roaring woodfire, fortifying
+themselves, with the aid of coffee, cigars, and chocolate-drops,--each
+according to his kind,--for a game of blind-man's-buff. The small
+scion of the house was seated on his grandfather's knee, playing with
+his grandfather's fob, after the immemorial habit of small scions.
+
+"Of course we named him Horatio!" It was Mrs. Crosby who answered,
+and, as her father-in-law looked across at her face with the
+firelight playing upon it, he seemed to remember that he had always
+wished for a daughter.
+
+"And what do you call him for short?"
+
+"Just Horatio!" piped up little Alice, who was sitting on the rug at
+the old gentleman's feet, gently pulling Rollo's long-suffering ears.
+
+"Yes," said Mr. Thomas Crosby; "we have always been proud of the
+name."
+
+Then Di, perceiving a slight unsteadiness in the voice in which this
+was said, stepped behind her grandfather's chair, and, dropping a
+small kiss on the top of his head, looked across at her father, and
+exclaimed:
+
+"Oh, Papa! To think of our having bagged a grandfather!"
+
+
+
+                  *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+A Selection from the Catalogue of
+
+G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
+
+Complete Catalogue sent on application
+
+
+
+
+BY ANNA FULLER
+
+A LITERARY COURTSHIP
+
+Under the Auspices of Pike's Peak. 28th thousand. Illustrated.
+Sextodecimo, gilt top. $1.25
+
+"A delightful little love story. Like her other books it is bright
+and breezy; its humor is crisp, and the general idea decidedly
+original."--Boston Times.
+
+A VENETIAN JUNE
+
+Illustrated by George Sloane. 15th thousand. Sextodecimo, gilt top
+$1.25
+
+"Full of the picturesqueness, the novelty, the beauty of life in the
+city of gondolas and gondoliers."--Literary World.
+
+Handsome Holiday Edition, Illustrated by Frederick Simpson Coburn.
+Octavo, $3.00
+
+PRATT PORTRAITS
+
+Sketched in a New England Suburb. 12th thousand. Illustrated by
+George Sloane. Duodecimo, gilt top $1.25
+
+"The lines the author cuts in her vignette are sharp and clear, but she
+has, too, not alone the knack of color, but what is rarer, the gift of
+humor."--New York Times.
+
+ONE OF THE PILGRIMS
+
+A Bank Story. 6th thousand. Duodecimo, gilt top, $1.25
+
+"The story is graceful and delightful, full of vivacity, and is not
+without pathos. It is thoroughly interesting."--Congregationalist.
+
+G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
+New York--London
+
+
+
+
+BY ANNA FULLER
+
+PEAK AND PRAIRIE
+From a Colorado Sketch Book.
+Duodecimo. Illustrated. 7th thousand $1.50
+
+"The stories are as varied as our Colorado wild-flowers, and through
+each one, whether grave or gay, runs a wholesome cheeriness and moral
+uplift which leaves the reader not only happier but better."--Colorado
+Springs Evening Telegraph.
+
+KATHERINE DAY
+Duodecimo. 8th thousand $1.50
+
+"A love story of the first water. The heroine is a woman's woman, and
+the hero is a man's man.... The spirit of 'Katherine Day' is very
+gallant, very humorously tender. The lightest passages, like the
+gravest, are sane and true."--Louise Imogen Guiney in The Critic.
+
+A BOOKFUL OF GIRLS
+Duodecimo. 4th thousand. With 6 Full-Page Illustrations $1.50
+
+This book is filled to the brim with happy school-girls, and overflowing
+with innocent mischief and fun. Madge and Patty, Blythe and Olivia, are
+at that "betwixt and between" age when the great questions are how
+high up the hair should go, and just how much boot-top should be left
+below the skirt.
+
+LATER PRATT PORTRAITS
+With 8 Full-Page Illustrations by Maud Tousey Faugel
+net $1.25
+
+The author's style is unaffected and charming; her humor is subtle and
+delightful; her characters are sharply drawn, and their stories told
+with fidelity and sympathy.
+
+G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
+New York--London
+
+
+
+
+The Thunderhead Lady
+By Anna Fuller and Brian Read
+With about 40 Line Drawings. $1.00 net. By mail, $1.10
+
+"Wanted: By a Harvard Graduate, a permanent position as husband.
+Carefully trained by an anxious mother, and used to feminine
+domination."
+
+So begins a clipping from the Boston Herald, written in jest, and
+printed from bravado, which elicits a reply from a chance reader and
+results in the correspondence that forms the substance of this little
+skit. From mock seriousness the writers drift off into more or less
+casual chat upon books and people, illumined from time to time with a
+touch of romance. The whole forms a bit of light reading which should
+appeal in equal measure to the thoughtful and the frivolous.
+
+New York--G. P. Putnam's Sons London
+
+
+
+
+By the Author of
+
+"Aunt Olive in Bohemia," "The Notch in the Stick," etc.
+
+The Peacock Feather By Leslie Moore
+$1.35 net. By mail, $1.50
+
+In a moment of reminiscent detachment the wearer of the Peacock
+feather describes himself as "one whom Fate in one of her freakish
+moods had wedded to the roads, the highways and hedges, the fields
+and woods. Once Cupid had touched him with his wing--the merest flick
+of a feather. The man--poor fool!--fancied himself wounded. Later
+when he looked for the scar, he found there was none." And so he
+wandered.
+
+Here is a rare love story, that breathes of the open spaces and is
+filled with the lure of the road.
+
+G. P. Putnam's Sons
+New York--London
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A BOOKFUL OF GIRLS***
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