should herd the cattle if she preferred it to spending an hour at “meetin’.” Luther, who also until this year had herded his father’s cattle and who usually spent the long days with the girl, had quaint ways of looking at religious questions which was a never-ending source of delight and interest to her. Their problems at home as well as at school were subjects of common discussion. He had been the beginning and the end of her social life. Now she took him into her dream of going away, and discussed her ideas of the best way of disposing of the stock by sale or gift, the sort of home she would have with her grandparents, and pictured, with a vivid imagination, the woods and streams she had heard her father describe. If she only could go! They stopped at every field to watch the voracious insects, which were eating every green thing upon which they happened to alight. A turnip patch on the corner of the Farnshaw place which had been straggling, but green, when the cattle had passed through it that afternoon, had not a leaf to show as they returned. The ground was dotted all over the patch with small holes where the hungry swarms, not satisfied with the tops, had followed the stems down into the earth, eating out the bulbs to the very taproots.

They drove the cattle across to the usual feeding place, but the grasshoppers flew up in continuous clouds before every moving object, and it was impossible for them to eat.

“Why don’t you take them in and shut them up?” Luther asked when he saw that the herd was so restless that the child could not manage them alone.

“Pa wouldn’t let me,” she sighed, and continued to ride around her charges.

Luther had intended going home long before this, but he knew that Lizzie could not control the restless cattle, and so he stayed with her, rather glad of the excuse to do so. Josiah Farnshaw’s temper was a matter of neighbourhood knowledge. A word of explanation to his father, Luther knew, would be all that he would need to make the fact of his absence commendable. He was glad of any excuse which would leave him with Lizzie Farnshaw for an extra hour, but he was to find that hour disappointing, for the cattle were restless and kept them both in constant motion.

When at last the time came to corral the stock a new calamity was discovered. The cattle wandered into the edge of a field of flax as they neared the barn. Luther, following them, dropped from the back of his pony and stopped to examine the grain. The girl was excitedly getting the straying animals crowded on toward the pens and it was not till she had the gate shut fast on them that she could take time to join him.

“What is it?” she asked as she rode up.

The lanky boy, who was really a man, measured the field slowly with his eye, calculating the damage before he answered slowly:

“Kicked it out o’ th’ pods flyin’ through. Must ’a’ been twenty acres. What made you let it get s’ ripe for? It ought t’ been cut three days ago, anyhow.”

The girl was out of her saddle in an instant. She walked into the body of the field somewhat, her face quivering pitifully as she examined the grain for herself. It was only too true! The beautiful brown seeds carpeted the earth around the roots of the flax, but no amount of harvesting would ever gather so much as a handful. The crop was a total loss.

“Poor ma!” she cried, when convinced beyond a doubt of the empty bolls. With the eyes of the prematurely old, she saw the extent of the ruin, and she knew what would be its effect upon the mother who seldom knew joy.

The loss of the turnips had seemed bad enough, but while watching the green things about her disappear it had not occurred to the child that the grasshoppers would eat the dry and, as Luther had said, overripe stems of the flax. Still less had it occurred to her that the insignificant wings and feet of such small things could do damage to an entire field by merely flying through it.

That flax was of paramount importance in the family calculations just now. In her considerations of the prospective move to the East, the price of this flax had figured largely. Family discussions had centred about that field for weeks. It was the one definite starting point in the bickerings about their weak and indefinite plans for the future. The loss of every other family asset could not have undone the child’s faith in the ultimate good of things so overwhelmingly. She choked back a sob as she mounted her horse again.

“Poor ma!” she repeated. “Pa told her she could have the money from the flax to go and see grandma on. You know grandma’s old, and they think she can’t live through the winter. That’s one reason why I was so glad when I thought we were going to have to go East to live. She don’t hardly know her own children any more, I hope ma don’t know about the flax; She’ll be sure to have one of her spells, and she’s just got over one. Ain’t it awful?”

Luther feared she was going to cry, and, man fashion, prepared to flee.

“I’ve got t’ go, Lizzie,” he said, and awkwardly held out his hand.

All thought of the flax disappeared from the girl’s mind.

“Oh, Luther!” she exclaimed in new distress, “won’t I ever see you again?”

The thought was so overwhelming that her tears came now from quite a different cause, and the frank eyes threatened to overflow as she stood clasping his bony hand in hers insistently. “What will I do without you?” she sobbed.

The unexpected question and the unexpected tears had an uncomfortable effect on the boy. He grew suddenly embarrassed and drew his hand away.

Some indefinable thing about the action made her conscious that there was a change in his feelings. It checked her rising emotions and made her curious. What was he embarrassed about? The girl stole a look at him, which left him still more disturbed and uneasy. It was an intangible thing upon which she could not remark and yet could not fail to recognize. Luther had never been awkward in her presence before. Their association had been of the most offhand and informal character. As a boy of fifteen he had carried her, a girl of eleven, over many a snowbank their first winter of school in the Prairie Home school district. They had herded cattle together, waded the shallow ponds and hunted for mussel shells, and until this year they had seen each other daily. This year Luther had taken a man’s place in the fields and the girl had seen him at rare intervals. She was not conscious of the change which this year of dawning adolescence had brought to them both. Luther had developed a growing need of a razor on his thin, yellow face, while she, four years younger, had also matured. The outgrown calico dress she wore was now halfway to her knees, its sleeves exposed some inches of sunburned wrists, and the scanty waist disclosed a rapidly rounding form. Young womanhood was upon her, unknown to her, and but now discovered by Luther Hansen. For the first time Luther felt the hesitancy of a youth in the presence of a maid.

“I shall miss you so!” the girl said, looking at him, puzzled by the indefinable something in his manner which was a new element in their communications.

Her frank curiosity put the boy utterly to rout. The blood surged to his pale face and pounded in the veins under his ears, half choking him; it cut short the leave-taking and left the child bewildered and half hurt.

She watched the calico pony lope away in a cloud of scurrying grasshoppers and wondered in a child-like way what could have happened. This abrupt and confused departure increased the loneliness she felt. He was her one real friend, and her tears came again as she turned toward the