better if you can make the tour all by yourselves. Young folks usually glory in unexplored fields. Now to it, for time is fleeting! I shall call for a report of your discoveries at luncheon. A prize for the one who has seen the most."

"Do we have to go by ourselves?" Peace lingered to ask.

"As you wish," was the brief response; and with his hat in his hand, the busy President descended the stairs, leaving a very bewildered group in the sewing-room behind him.

"Well!" Gail ejaculated. "How shall we begin?"

"I saw a piano as we came through the hall below," Faith half whispered.

"And books! Everywhere!" cried Cherry, her eyes fastened longingly upon the little book-case in the corner. "Do they really belong to us now?"

"Yes, of course," answered Peace in business-like tones. "Come on, Allee; let's get to work and see what we can find before lunch time. This is a pretty big house, and we've got to hustle if we get all around it in an hour and a half. Wonder where grandpa and grandma went. Shall we commence at the bottom and work up, or start in at the attic? I guess the attic first will be best, seeing we've come up one flight of stairs already, and it would be just a waste of time to go down and have to climb them all again." Answering her own question, she clutched Alice's hand and disappeared in one direction, as the sisters, following her example, scattered about the great house on their tours of inspection.

The next ninety minutes were busy ones in the Campbell house, and it was necessary to ring the dinner bell twice before all members of the happy family were summoned to the table.

"Well, how goes it?" smiled the President. "Judging from the time it took to gather the clans, some of you must have been pretty busy."

"We were," dreamily murmured Cherry, who had been dragged bodily from the stacks of books in the library.

"Made any great discoveries?"

"Yes, indeed!" they cried in unison.

"Good! I'm all impatience! Relate your adventures. We are anxious to hear how you like your new home—mother and I. Abigail, you are the oldest; suppose you begin."

"I didn't get very far, I am afraid," said Gail modestly. "Just a peep into the rooms upstairs and a beginning down here when I found Gussie almost on the verge of tears because her dessert had burned black and she had no time to make any more; so I—"

"Bet our talking burned up her pies," Peace was heard to murmur remorsefully.

"—helped her out a little," continued Gail, "and by that time the bell rang, so there was no opportunity for any further investigations."

"Saint Elizabeth," said the President reverently, while the white-haired mistress of the house beamed her approval.

"Now, Faith,—but there is really no need of asking her about her discoveries. She got no further than the parlor with its piano. Now, did you?"

"No, grandpa," Faith confessed unblushingly. "I saw it when we came in, and I simply couldn't resist it a minute longer than was absolutely necessary. There will be lots of days for getting acquainted here, and besides, I knew Peace would carry off the prize—"

"Me carry off the prize!" Peace interrupted. "I've never got a prize for anything in my life—"

"Only because there never was one offered before for the person who could see the most or talk the longest," laughed Faith, and Peace subsided suddenly.

"Saint Cecilia,—she could not get past the piano," teased Dr. Campbell, when the shout of laughter at Faith's sally had died away. "Hope, what have you to say for yourself?"

"Not much. I visited all the rooms upstairs and down; fed the canary; got acquainted with Blinks, the cat, and Kyte, the hound; found Towzer and tried to make him be friends with Kyte, but he wouldn't be coaxed. Gussie said there were some kittens in the basement, so I went down there to find them, but the boy from the hardware store was there working on the furnace, and some way we fell to talking about studies, and he was so discouraged over his algebra lesson for night-school that I stopped to see if I could help him out a little, and the bell rang Just as we got the third problem worked."

"My gentle Saint Lucia," he said in praise, as he turned from her to the next sister in age. "Cherry, give an account of your wanderings."

"I wandered downstairs as far as the library—I guess that is what you call it."

"And then what?" for she stopped as if her tale were told.

"That's all. I stayed there."

"Oh!" The President wilted, Mrs. Campbell stared, and for a moment even the sisters were silent in surprise at the matter-of-fact tone of the narrator; then the whole assembly burst into another merry shout, much to the disgust of poor Cherry, who could see no cause for amusement, and voiced her sentiments by saying petulantly, "I don't see anything the matter with that! What difference is there between playing the piano all the morning and reading books?"

"It wasn't what you did that amused us," said Mrs. Campbell soothingly. "It was the way you told it. We won't laugh any more."

"Oh!" breathed the ruffled damsel in relief, "if that's all, I don't care how much you laugh. But you'll have a better chance with Peace—she never can tell anything straight."

"What kind of a saint is Cherry?" inquired the younger girl, ignoring the compliment she had just received. "If Gail is Saint 'Lizabeth and Faith is Saint Cecilia and Hope is Saint Lucy, what's Cherry?"

"Saint Bookworm, I guess, Miss Curiosity-Box. What have you been doing this morning?"

"Oh, lots of things," she sighed heavily. "Allee and me went together. We began with the attic, which is full of trunks of old clothes and battered-up furniture and cobwebs, and has two rooms for the hired girls to sleep in. Gussie's room is just suburb! It's dec'rated with the queerest looking old bird of a bedstead—"

"Peace! What slang!" cried Faith in genuine horror.

"It's no such thing! It is a bird! She calls it a swan, for it's got a tall, crooked neck for the foot-board, and if I had it in my room, I'd hang curtains on its tail. It could be done just splendid! I'll show you after lunch if you don't b'lieve me."

"Oh, we believe you! Go on. I'm interested in that room," begged Hope, wondering why she too had not begun with the attic.

"Then on the wall she has a great fish-net full of the prettiest postcards of Norway and Sweden and De'mark. She's a Swede, you know,—Gussie is; and her married brother and two sisters and grandmother still live over there. That's where the fish-net came from. I didn't have time to stop long to look at the cards 'cause there was so much else to do 'fore lunch time, but she's invited us to come up some evening when she's through work and then she'll tell all about them. There's the loveliest green and yellow quilt on her bed that she made all herself. She said grandma had a red one for her to use, but it seemed more like home with her own things, so she uses them instead of those that b'long to the house. But the prettiest of everything is a queer little piece of glass hanging in the window which makes her room look like a real rainbow on sunny days, 'cause the prison respects the light and sorts out all the colors. Oh, you needn't laugh and think you know better! Gussie told us all about it, didn't she, Allee?"

"Gussie did not call it a prison," Hope could not refrain from saying. "It is a prism, and it re—it isn't respects the light, grandpa—"

"No. Refracts is the word she wants to use. Peace tries to drink in so much information that she can't digest it all."

"Maybe that is what's the matter," Peace agreed thoughtfully. "Anyway, her room is a beauty—lots prettier that Marie's, though Marie has the same chance of making hers look nice that Gussie has. There's the same difference in the girls themselves that there is in their rooms, too."

"Why, what do you mean?" cried the astonished mistress of the house, while the