at the sound; and to emphasize his admonishing words, he dug his sharp elbow so suddenly into March's ribs that some hot molasses tea flew from the cup which his brother had just put to his mouth and spattered on his bare feet.

March deliberately set down his tin cup on the hearth near the fire beside his brother's, and turned upon Budd.

Budd tried to dodge, but had no room. In a trice, March had his arms around him, and was hugging him in a bear-like embrace. "Say you 're sorry!" he demanded.

"Au-ow!"

"Say you 're sorry!" he roared at him, hugging harder.

"Au-ow-ee-ow!"

"Quick, or I 'll squeeze you some more!"

Budd was squirming and twisting like an eel.

"O-ee-wau-au-Au!"

"There," said March, releasing him and setting him down with a thump on the rug; "I 'll teach you to poke me in the ribs that way and scald my feet.--You 're game, though, old fellow," he added patronizingly, as he heard a suspicious sniff from Cherry. "You and Cherry make a whole team any day."

Cherry's sniff changed to a smile, for March did not condescend to praise either of them very often.

"Well," she said meditatively, "I suppose it did sound funny to say that, but I was thinking that if Budd would make me a little heart-shaped box of birch-bark, I 'd make some maple-sugar fudge,--you know, Martie, the kind with butternuts in it,--and that could be my valentine for the Doctor."

"Why, that's a bright idea, Cherry," said Mrs. Blossom; and, "Bully for you, Cherry," said Budd; "we'll begin to-morrow and crack the butternuts."

"What will May do?" asked Mrs. Blossom, lifting the little girl, who was already showing signs of being overcome with molasses tea and sleep. May nestled in her mother's arms, leaned her head, running over with golden curls, on her mother's breast, and murmured drowsily,--

"'Ittle tooties--tut with mummy's heart-tutter--tutter--tooties--tut--" The blue-veined eyelids closed over the lovely eyes; and Mrs. Blossom, holding up her finger to hush the children's mirth at May's inspired utterance, carried her back into the bedroom.

One after another the children crept noiselessly upstairs, with a whispered, "Good-night, Martie," and in ten minutes Mary Blossom knew they were all in the land of dreams.

II

MRS. BLOSSOM'S VALENTINE

It was a bitter night. Mrs. Blossom refilled the kitchen stove, and threw on more hickory in the fireplace in anticipation of her husband's late return from the village. She drew her little work-table nearer to the blaze, and sat down to her sewing. Then she sighed, and, as she bent over the large willow basket filled with stockings to be darned and clothes to be mended, a tear rolled down her cheek and plashed on the edge.

There was so much she wanted to do for her children--and so little with which to do it! There was March, an artist to his finger-tips, who longed to be an architect; and Rose, lovely in her young girlhood and giving promise of a lovelier womanhood, who was willing to work her way through one of the lesser colleges, if only she could be prepared for entrance. Mary Blossom saw no prospect of being able to do anything for either of them.

And the father! He must be spared first, if he were to be their future bread-winner. Mary Blossom could never forget that day, a year ago this very month, when her husband was brought home on a stretcher, hurt, as they thought, unto death, by a tree falling the wrong way in the woods where he was directing the choppers.

What a year it had been! All they had saved had gone to pay for the extra help hired to carry on the farm and finish the log-cutting. A surgeon had come from the nearest city to give his verdict in the case and help if he could.

The farm was mortgaged to enable them to pay the heavy bills incident to months of sickness and medical attendance; still the father lay helpless, and Mary Blossom's faith and courage were put to their severest test, when both doctor and surgeon pronounced the case hopeless. He might live for years, they said, but useless, so far as his limbs were concerned.

This was in June; and then it was that Mary Blossom, leaving Rose in charge of her father and the children, left her home, and walked bareheaded rapidly up the slope behind the house, across the upland pastures and over into the woodlands, from which they had hoped to derive a sufficient income to provide not only for their necessities, but for their children's education and the comforts of life.

Deep into the heart of them she made her way; and there, in the green silence, broken only by the note of a thrush and the stirring of June leafage above and about her, she knelt and poured out her sorrow-filled heart before God, and cast upon Him the intolerable burden that had rested so long upon her soul.

The shadows were lengthening when at last she turned homewards. Cherry and Budd met her in the pasture, for Rose had grown anxious and sent them to find her.

"Why, where have you been, Martie?" exclaimed the twins. "We were so frightened about you, because you didn't come home."

"You need n't have been; I 've been talking with a Friend." And more than that she never said. The children's curiosity was roused, but when they told Rose and asked her what mother meant, Rose's eyes filled with tears, and she kept silence; for she alone knew with Whom her mother had talked that June afternoon.

"Run ahead, Budd, and tell Malachi to harness up Bess. I want him to take a letter down to the village so that it may go on the night mail." Budd flew rather than ran; for there was a look in his mother's face that he had never seen before, and it awed him.

That night a letter went to Doctor Heath, a famous nerve specialist of New York City. It was a letter from Mary Blossom, his old-time friend and schoolmate in the academy at Barton's River. In it she asked him if he would give her his advice in this case, saying she could not accept the decision of the physician and surgeon unless it should be confirmed by him.

"I cannot pay you now," she wrote, "but it was borne in upon me this afternoon to write to you, although you may have forgotten me in these many years, and I have no claim of present friendship, even, upon your time and service; but I must heed the inner command to appeal to you, whatever you may think of me,--if I disobeyed that, I should be disobeying God's voice in my life,"--and signed herself, "Yours in childhood's remembrance."

The next day a telegram was brought up from the village; and the day after the Doctor himself followed it.

It was an anxious week; but the wonderful skill conquered. The pressure on a certain nerve was removed, and for the last six months Benjamin Blossom had been slowly but surely coming back to his old-time health and strength. But again this winter the extra help had been necessary, and it had taxed all Mary Blossom's ingenuity to make both ends meet; for there was