he said, “I have some money now. Do you know what we will have to pay our neighbor to make good the loss of his ax?”

“Yes,” the father answered, “the ax was nearly new, and it cost him a dollar.”

“Then give him two dollars,” the son said. “He will have no regrets when he gets double payment. Here are fifty dollars. Pay our neighbor and keep the rest for yourself. You shall live at your ease in future and never want again.”

“My goodness!” the man exclaimed, “where did you get this money?”

The son told everything that had happened. He now could easily procure all the money he pleased, and the first use he made of his wealth was to return to school and learn as much as he could. Afterward, because he could heal all wounds with his rag, he became the most celebrated surgeon in the world.

V—YALLERY BROWN

Once upon a time there was a lad about eighteen years old named Tom Tiver who had hired out to work for a farmer. One beautiful Sunday night in July he was walking across a field. The weather was warm and still, and the air was full of little sounds as if the trees and grasses were softly chattering to themselves.

But all at once there came from on ahead the most pitiful wailings that ever he had heard—a sobbing as of a child spent with fear and nearly heartbroken. Soon the sound changed to a moan, and then rose again in a long whimpering wailing that made Tom sick to hark to it. He began to look everywhere for the poor creature.

“It must be Sally Barton’s child,” he thought. “She was always a flighty thing and never looks after it properly. Like as not she’s flaunting about the lanes, and has clean forgot the baby.”

He looked and looked, yet he could see nought. Meanwhile the whimpering got louder and stronger and there seemed to be words of some sort mingled with the sobs. Tom harkened with all his ears, and heard the unhappy creature saying: “Oh! the stone, the great big stone! Oh! the stone on top!”

He wondered where the stone might be, and he looked until he found, close to a hedge, a great flat stone almost buried in the earth and hidden in the matted grass and weeds. Down he fell on his knees and listened again. Clearer than ever, but tired with crying came the little sobbing voice, “Oh! oh! the stone, the stone on top!”

Tom was scared, and he disliked to meddle with the thing, but he could not withstand the whimpering baby, and he tore like mad at the earth around the stone till he got his fingers under it and felt it loosening. Then a puff of warm air came out of the damp earth and the tangle of grass and growing things, and he tipped the stone back out of the way.

Underneath where it had been was a cavity, and there lay a tiny thing on its back blinking up at the moon and at him. It was no bigger than a year old baby, but it had a great mass of hair and a heavy beard, and the hair and the beard were so long and so twisted round and round the creature’s body that Tom could not see its clothes. The hair was yellow and silky like a child’s, but the face of the thing was as old as if it had not been young and smooth for hundreds of years. There were just wrinkles and two bright black eyes set in a lot of shining yellow hair; and the skin was the color of fresh-turned earth in the spring—brown as brown could be—and its bare hands and feet were as brown as its face. The crying had stopped, but the tears were standing on its cheeks, and the tiny creature looked dazed in the moonshine and the night air.

When its eyes got used to the moonlight it looked boldly up in Tom’s face and said: “Tom, you are a good lad.”

The coolness with which it spoke was