say:

After this kind of letter one felt more than ever ashamed.

Maybe the Good Crow would put a different sort of letter under the pillow:

One might come home from school and find that Aunt Phoebe’s crow had flown in at Aunt Phoebe’s window during school hours to leave tickets to go to a special children’s performance of Alice in Wonderland to be on Saturday afternoon. Oh, the crow was always doing things that were happy. And, you know, Aunt Phoebe kept him fully informed as to what the children liked best. She knew.

Mother and Daddy and Aunt Phoebe all liked the crow. Indeed, strange to relate, sometimes when Aunt Phoebe was visiting and Mother happened to say that she had admired a certain kind of pretty plant that she had seen in a window down-town, the crow brought the plant and set it in the middle of the dining-room table next day! He left a card with it, of course. The card said, “With love from the children’s Crow.” (Of course, a real crow couldn’t have carried the things that Caw Caw did. Being a play crow and just pretend, he could bring almost anything.)

Oh, I tell you it was jolly! Everybody in the house crowed with laughter over Aunt Phoebe’s Caw Caw. He made jokes; he sent funny pictures cut from magazines; he wrote rhymes and verses that made Mother and Daddy and Jimsi and Henry and Katherine—and even Aunt Phoebe herself—just double up and laugh. One day he left each of the children a big black feather. The feathers were done up in reams and reams of tissue paper. You’d have thought there were BIG presents in the parcels that were waiting on the hall table till Jimsi and Henry came home from school! And then after unrolling and unrolling and unrolling and unrolling out dropped the black feathers. They looked as if somebody had found them in the feather duster but they were labeled, “From Caw Caw’s wing, with love. Keep to remember me.”

Oh, Aunt Phoebe’s visits were such good fun and Caw Caw Crow was so jolly! It was always hard to say good-bye after the two weeks or the month had passed. Henry kept all his crow-treasures—except the eatable ones and those like Alice in Wonderland entertainment tickets. He put them in a drawer with his letters. Jimsi kept hers in a box. As for Katherine, she was still interested in blocks and squeaky dolls made of rubber. Mother kept Katherine’s crow letters till Katherine should grow up to enjoy them all over again some day.

Well, when Aunt Phoebe had gone, the Good Crow play usually stopped unless Mother kept it up or Jimsi or Henry or maybe Daddy tried it. But the crow was never as entertaining as when Aunt Phoebe was around.

Once upon a time, Jimsi got sick. She was really frightfully sick—sick for a long, long time. She had the doctor and then she began to get well slowly. At this time, almost every day in the mail would come a letter from Aunt Phoebe’s Crow telling Jimsi something nice to play in bed. Some days a postal card would come. Some days a pretty book. Some days a bit of doll-sewing. But the very nicest thing of all came when Jimsi was well enough to go out-doors again and not well enough to go back to school. It was a crow letter and it came with a postmark of the town where Aunt Phoebe lived on it. This is what the letter said. (It was written on very wee blue notepaper and written in the tiny handwriting that Aunt Phoebe’s Good Crow usually liked.)

Oh, oh, oh! Hooray!

“Mumsey, I may go, mayn’t I?” pleaded Jimsi. “Oh, I never was at Aunt Phoebe’s! I’ll be good; I’ll go to bed early and I’ll try not to read too much; I’ll take my horrid medicine and I’ll never, never forget to wear overshoes!”

“I want to go too,” urged Henry. “I want to go too!”

“Me too!” echoed baby Katherine. “Me too!”

“Hush!” cried Mother. “I’ll have to ask Daddy, Jimsi dear. We’ll see what the doctor thinks of it. Maybe Aunt Phoebe’s house is the best place a little girl could grow well and strong in. Maybe you can go—but I can’t promise; we’ll see.”

All day long Jimsi went about the house wondering whether she was going to be allowed to go to Aunt Phoebe’s. She and Henry talked about it. “What do you suppose the crow’s Happy Shop is?” they asked each other.

“It’s something ever so nice if it’s the crow,” declared Jimsi. “Maybe it’s a store where the crow buys things.”

“It might be the place where he makes things,” Henry suggested. “Shops are sometimes places where things are made.”

All day long they talked about it. After the doctor had come and gone and when Daddy reached home after business, when the tea table things were cleared away and Jimsi and Henry and Mother and Daddy sat about the lamp in the living-room, they talked about the good crow and the Happy Shop some more. It was decided that day after to-morrow, Jimsi should really go to visit Aunt Phoebe and find out what a Happy Shop was!

Oh, oh, oh! Hooray! Three cheers for Aunt Phoebe and the Good Crow! Hip-hip-hoorah! Hip-hip-hoorah! Hip-hip-hoorah!

That night Jimsi was very happy. She fell asleep to dream of a big black crow who was sitting in a queer little store inside an odd house that was like the White Rabbit’s home in Alice in Wonderland. Of course Jimsi had never seen the crow face to face before but the dream seemed delightfully real and funny. She told Daddy and Mother about it in the morning, and Henry declared that dreams were never true and that, of course, Jimsi wouldn’t see the crow at Aunt Phoebe’s because the crow was all make-believe and there wasn’t any. “We just pretend there is a crow,” he said. “It’s a kind of game. The Happy Shop is prob-ab-ly—(the word is quite a long one for nine years old)—prob-ab-ly another nice new play of Aunt Phoebe’s. There won’t be any real crow there, Jimsi!”

“Oh, I know,” smiled Jimsi. “But it will be a splendid fun of some kind. I can’t wait to find out what it is. When I find out, I’ll write home all about it.”

Really everybody was as interested to know what The Happy Shop really was as Jimsi. Poor Henry had to go off to school. Daddy went to his office downtown. Only Mother and Jimsi were left to speculate upon the subject that day. It was a busy day too for