he had enjoyed life earlier in the day. This one, however, offered no entertainment beyond wandering about the platform and the unoccupied waiting-room. Across the street was a little restaurant. There were pies in the window.

Elsmere obeyed the summons.

“Pie,” he said, presenting his nose to the edge of the lunch counter.

“Don’t you monkey with anything,” snapped a girl from behind the counter.

“I’m aren’t a monkey. I’m are a boy. Want pie,” Elsmere answered sweetly.

“You can’t get pie without money,” said the girl.

Elsmere felt in his pocket and produced a quarter. 33 Whatever his failings, Elsmere had a redeeming trait of forehandedness, and had always on hand a hoard of articles which might be useful in an hour of need. The quarter bought respect at once and plenty of pie, also a sandwich, a tall glass of milk and a big “rubber doughnut.”

When he had satisfied his hunger, the traveller returned to the depot, and, lying comfortably in the shade of a baggage truck, indulged in a siesta, a sleep so light this time, however, that the rolling back of the baggage-room door shattered it.

Sitting up, Elsmere watched the baggage-man get a tin trunk and a canvas telescope ready for shipping. Presently the stub train arrived, stopped, and while the conductor and the agent were exchanging gossip, Elsmere got inconspicuously aboard, and stowed himself away in a corner, so successfully that it was not till the brakeman called “Hampton” that the conductor discovered him.

Swearing softly and scratching his head in mystification, the conductor stood in the aisle staring at the ubiquitous babe, when a double cry arose:

“Elsmere, where in thunder?”

“Hullo, Algy!”

The young assistant, who had accompanied Catherine to the station for the sake of talking over mutual friends at Dexter, looked up in surprise as the dignified youth who had impressed her greatly by his intelligence and earnestness suddenly 34 stooped and lifted a dirty, tear-and-pie-stained little boy in his arms. Catherine laughed. Elsmere could not greatly surprise her.

“Miss Adams,” she said, “you have shown your interest in the new Winsted library. Let me introduce you to its mascot.”

The morning after the Hampton expedition, Catherine struggled awake from dreams of book-lined trains, with Miss Adams and Elsmere as engineer and fireman, to open her eyes gratefully upon the substantial reality of her own great room in its fresh bareness. At the foot of her big carved bed, the broad window open to its utmost seemed to bring all out-of-doors within the room. A squirrel whisked his tail across the sill as he scurried in and out of the branches of the window-oak where a grosbeak and a wren chatted sociably. The sunshine through the leafy boughs lighted the bare floor and rested on the great writing table in the center of the room and on the high dark dresser. Catherine’s gaze, following the light, rested at last upon the low bookcases filling the chimney corners.

“I can spare one Child’s Garden of Verses,” she mused, “and that second Little Women. I wish they could have the Walter Crane and Kate Greenaway picture-books, but I couldn’t possibly let them go. I loved those little urchins in the children’s room,–especially that curly-headed little 35 boy reading a bound Wide-Awake–O!” She sat up in bed and tossed her thick braids back. “I wonder if I ought? Or even if I could?” Out of bed she slipped, and crossed the room to the bookcases. Opening one, she ran her finger-tips tenderly along the stout backs of a row of dark red volumes. “My very own Wide-Awakes! What a storehouse they would be for the little folk! They needn’t be allowed to circulate, so they’d not wear out badly. They could just come in and read them there. I was going to give them my little rocking-chair, anyhow. O, dear! I’m afraid I’m really going to let them have you, you dear, dear books. It would be selfish to keep you up here all the time, when I almost never open you. Nobody shall have this one, though, with Hannah’s letter in it.”

She turned the pages of one of the latest volumes and paused at a neat little paragraph: