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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 76069 ***
+
+Transcriber's note: Unusual and inconsistent spelling is as printed.
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+                        Pansy's Home Story Book
+
+
+                  Edited by MRS. G. R. ALDEN. (Pansy)
+
+    AUTHOR OF "FOUR GIRLS AT CHAUTAUQUA," "CHAUTAUQUA GIRLS AT HOME,"
+         "ESTER RIED," "LINKS IN REBECCA'S LIFE," "JULIA RIED,"
+     "HOUSEHOLD PUZZLES," "RUTH ERSKINE'S CROSSES," "THE RANDOLPHS,"
+        "WISE AND OTHERWISE," "A NEW GRAFT ON THE FAMILY TREE,"
+       "WHAT SHE SAID, AND WHAT SHE MEANT," "THE POCKET MEASURE,"
+   "HALL IN THE GROVE," "SOME YOUNG HEROINES," "EUGENE COOPER," ETC.
+
+
+                            [Illustration]
+
+
+                         _FULLY ILLUSTRATED_
+
+
+                                BOSTON
+                      LOTHROP PUBLISHING COMPANY
+
+
+
+                           Copyright, 1896,
+                                  BY
+                     LOTHROP PUBLISHING COMPANY.
+                                 ———
+                        All rights reserved.
+
+
+
+                               CONTENTS.
+
+
+
+   YOUNG PEOPLE AT HOME.
+
+      EUGENE COOPER.
+
+      STELLA WESTON AT HOME.
+
+      JOHN MAYNARD.
+
+      SOMEBODY'S TROUBLE.
+
+      SOME YOUNG HEROINES.
+
+      A LITTLE WHITE CASKET.
+
+      HOUSEKEEPING. BY REV. G. R. ALDEN.
+
+      THE OLD ARM-CHAIR.
+
+      BROKEN.
+
+      CHARLIE SMYTHE.
+
+      GRANDMOTHER BROWNSON.
+
+      A FOOLISH LITTLE GIRL.
+
+      FLORENCE AT HOME.
+
+      MINNIE LEE AND HER KITTEN.
+
+      ONLY A SPARK.
+
+      ROBERT HALL.
+
+      A LETTER FROM BIRD-LAND.
+
+      HARVEY IN TROUBLE.
+
+      TWO SINGERS.
+
+      HE WENT IN. BY REV. C. M. LIVINGSTON.
+
+      [JESUS, LOVER OF MY SOUL]
+
+      A THANKSGIVING SHOWER.
+
+      THE OTHER SINGER.
+
+      NAILS. BY REV. C. M. LIVINGSTON.
+
+      THE SPARROW IN THE SNOW.
+
+      THE BOY WHO WANTED TO BE A HERO.
+
+      RUFUS MAKES A POCKET MEASURE.
+
+      TWO WAYS OF LOOKING AT IT.
+
+      THEIR FAITH.
+
+      HOW SIDNEY GOT THE PLACE.
+
+      THE LITTLE YELLOW DOG. BY MRS. C. M. LIVINGSTON.
+
+      WHERE I WENT, AND WHAT I SAW.
+
+   STORIES FOR BOYS AND GIRLS.
+
+      HAPPY NEW YEAR!
+
+      WHO DID IT?—A STORY IN TWO CHAPTERS. CHAPTER I.
+
+      A DAY THAT JOHNNY NEVER FORGOT. BY MRS. C. M. LIVINGSTON.
+
+      THREE LITTLE M'S.—A THREE-PART STORY. BY MARGARET SIDNEY.
+
+      TWENTY-FOUR HOURS.
+
+      P. S.
+
+      SIDE BY SIDE. [PART I.]
+
+      "THE OTHER ONE."
+
+      THE THREE LITTLE M'S.—PART II. BY MARGARET SIDNEY.
+
+      WHO DID IT? PART SECOND.
+
+      SIDE BY SIDE. [PART II.]
+
+      THE THREE LITTLE M'S.—PART III. BY MARGARET SIDNEY.
+
+      PANSIES P. S. THOUGHT.
+
+      WHO DID IT? PART THIRD.
+
+      SIDE BY SIDE. [PART III.]
+
+
+
+                        PANSY'S HOME STORY BOOK
+
+
+
+                         YOUNG PEOPLE AT HOME
+
+                            [Illustration]
+
+                            EUGENE COOPER.
+
+"WELL, begin," said George Dunlap.
+
+The other boys laughed.
+
+It was just at the close of summer vacation, and the five friends
+having met under the old tree, had agreed to give the story of their
+travels. It had not been decided who should be first speaker, so there
+seemed nothing to do but laugh over George Dunlap's direction.
+
+"All of us do you mean?" Charlie Smythe asked.
+
+"No, I mean you; or, no, the fellow that took the longest journey shall
+have the first chance."
+
+"I went just twenty-four miles," said Charlie, meditatively.
+
+Then they all laughed again.
+
+"We needn't laugh, yet," George Dunlap said, when his laugh was over.
+"It may happen that Charlie saw more in those twenty-four miles, than
+we who went a thousand."
+
+"I don't believe a single one of us went a thousand miles."
+
+"Oh ho! You don't? Then you are mistaken. I went very nearly two
+thousand." This from Eugene Cooper.
+
+"Then begin," said George Dunlap. "You're the very fellow."
+
+"Well, from the very beginning, do you mean? It will take a week! In
+the first place we struck a bee line for Albany, in New York State, you
+know."
+
+"How do you go to Albany?"
+
+"Well now, that depends on what point you start from; I met a fellow
+who walked to Albany every Monday morning, and walked back on Friday;
+but we went by rail."
+
+"Of course; I mean what road?"
+
+"Oh, we went down the New York Central,—took it at Buffalo, you know.
+We went by steamer to Buffalo, down Lake Erie. That's a splendid ride:
+great handsome steamer, saloon all carpeted, and curtains and mirrors
+and sofas, finer than some folks' parlors. I went on deck, and one of
+the sailors walked around with me and showed me the life-boat, and how
+they lowered it, and the ropes, and everything. I was sorry when we got
+to Buffalo. There we took the train. Little narrow cars, not like the
+Erie, that I've been used to riding on; nice enough, though, and they
+go like sixty. Why, we were in Albany by dark, and it is two hundred
+and ninety-eight miles!"
+
+"Well now, we shall be more likely to be astonished, if you tell us
+what time you left Buffalo."
+
+"Why, in the morning, about ten o'clock."
+
+"That 'was' doing pretty well. Better than my father did; he went from
+Albany to Buffalo about fifty years ago, and it took him three weeks."
+
+"How long is it since the Central Railroad was built, anyhow?"
+
+"Look here, boys," interrupted Eugene Cooper, "you are stealing my
+time; I didn't promise to tell about the Central Railroad, nor the way
+folks used to travel before it was built."
+
+"All right. Tell us about Albany. How big a town is it?"
+
+"Oh, it's big enough, eighty or ninety thousand or so; a handsome old
+city I tell you! Nice wide streets, some of them; State street is the
+handsomest,—wide and clean, and straight up a hill. We stopped at the
+Delavan house; that's the nicest in the city I guess,—nice enough to
+suit me, anyhow. My! But it's elegant.
+
+"Do you fellows know about Delavan? Father says he was a poor boy, a
+boot-black, and he used to hear the folks talking a good deal about a
+house, somewhere in Albany, that cost a great deal of money and was
+considered very grand in those days. And Delavan stood looking at it
+one day, and says he to himself, 'I'll build a bigger house than that,
+one of these days.' He did it, too; father says the house they used to
+think so fine was just nothing by the side of the Delavan."
+
+"He did a bigger thing than build the Delavan house. I think," said
+George Dunlap.
+
+"Why, what did he do?" chorused the boys.
+
+"He was a grand temperance man, and worked for the cause and gave money
+for it."
+
+"Did you go down the Hudson?" questioned Robert Hall, whose mind was on
+travel, and not on great men.
+
+"I reckon I did! Boys, the Hudson is just the grandest river on this
+continent I do believe. I got up before daylight to see the palisades."
+
+"I haven't the faintest kind of an idea what the palisades are." This,
+Charlie Smythe said, stretched out at full length on the grass, a
+wistful look in his eyes. About twenty-four miles had been the extent
+of his travels every year, but he longed to see and know.
+
+"Why, my child, the palisades are, are—well now it's difficult to
+explain things to people who have never seen them."
+
+This was the most comprehensive answer that Horace Brooks, with his
+extensive opportunities could make, and the boys roared.
+
+"They are rocks, my child, great splendid rocks, from three to five
+hundred feet high, straight up and down, and they are as much as
+fifteen miles long. What do you think of such a showing of rocks as
+that!"
+
+"Where's the sense in calling them palisades? I thought palisades were
+nothing, but a row of sharp-pointed sticks, built up around a fort, or
+something of that kind."
+
+This time the boys stared at each other instead of laughing; Charlie
+was always asking questions that were hard to answer.
+
+"I don't know," said Eugene, frankly. "Do any of you? They look as
+though they might have been built up for forts, that's a fact. I
+shouldn't wonder if they took their name from that. Anyhow, they are
+grand to look at. Oh, that reminds me! Don't you think I saw—"
+
+Just at that moment came an interruption,—a young man tearing down the
+road in hot haste, waving his hat, and shouting lustily to some one in
+the distance.
+
+"What's that he is yelling?" asked four of the five boys.
+
+And none of them answering, George Dunlap said, "He's scared at
+something; let's go and see."
+
+Then every one of those fellows sprang up and took to their heels,
+regardless of the wonders of travel and the beauties of the Hudson.
+
+                            ══════════
+
+
+
+                        STELLA WESTON AT HOME.
+
+OH, yes, she was at home, curled up in the corner of the couch, with
+the last number of the "Wide Awake" in her hand, buried in a story.
+Much good it did to have her at home! Little Miss Amie Weston was
+also at home, and was supposed to be under Stella's care. Such care!
+Anything short of pulling the house down about her ears, would have
+failed to arouse Stella until she reached the end of her story. It is
+a mercy that the nursery was heated from a black hole in the floor,
+instead of by a grate-fire, or the house might have been well under
+way, burning down, before Stella would have known it.
+
+Amie had been established with her blocks, and told to "be a good
+child, there's a dear, and let sister read." And she was doing it. The
+blocks, to be sure, did not last long; hadn't she played with them a
+thousand times? She wanted something new. There was kitty, pushing
+softly in from the hall. Dear me! What black paws kitty had! She must
+have been in the coal-cellar after a mouse.
+
+Amie resolved that she ought to be washed before she was allowed to
+jump on the sofa.
+
+She spoke to Stella, about it, but Stella was buried, you know, and
+heard nothing.
+
+So, with much tugging and groaning, she succeeded in bringing the
+china bowl to the floor, and pouring a little water in it, and a good
+deal over the carpet. This she carefully wiped up with one end of the
+Persian rug, that lay before the toilet-stand. Then she made a lovely
+lather with cashmere bouquet soap, and splashed poor kitty in, head
+and ears. There was much squealing, and spitting, and a little bit of
+scratching, but Amie, being a brave girl, endured it, and brought one
+of the heavy damask towels from the rack to wipe the wretched kitty's
+eyes; then the hair brush of real bristles, and with inlaid handle, was
+dipped into the suds, and did duty in brushing kitty's soaking fur and
+whiskers.
+
+[Illustration: PUSSY'S TOILETTE.]
+
+Just what Amie would have done next will never be known, for the cat
+suddenly resolved that she would not endure such treatment another
+minute, and, giving a skilful jump from her tormentor's hands to the
+side of the bowl, and from the bowl to the floor, with a fearful
+"yowl," departed through the open door.
+
+I am sorry to tell you that in her flight she overturned the bowl of
+suds.
+
+"Sakes!" said Amie, in dismay.
+
+That yell from the cat roused even Stella, and she dropped her "Wide
+Awake," and sat upright.
+
+"What on 'earth' is the matter?"
+
+Then, catching sight of the plight that Amie was in, with a lap full of
+foamy water, she started up.
+
+"Why, Amie Weston! What 'have' you done now? I never 'did see' such a
+child! You are always doing mischief!"
+
+Oh, dear! What trouble there was in that home, Amie's dress was stained
+with the soapsuds, and her shoes and stockings were wet, and the hair
+brush was spoiled, and Stella's temper was spoiled, and the mother,
+when she came, was tempted to scold both Amie and Stella, and punish
+the poor cat.
+
+To whom do you think Stella laid all the blame? When she found that
+Amie was really too little to know better, and remembered that the cat
+never had any sense, she threw the "Wide Awake" down on the floor,
+and kicked it under the sofa, and said, "It is all the fault of that
+hateful old book! If it hadn't been for that, all these mean things
+wouldn't have happened."
+
+
+
+                             JOHN MAYNARD.
+
+FANNY STUART sat for fully twenty minutes, biting the end of her lead
+pencil, or making little irregular scratches with it, on the paper
+before her. At last she said in her weariest and most discouraged
+tones, "Oh, dear me! I 'can't' think of anything. I wish we had a
+different subject."
+
+"What's the matter now?" It was her fourteen-year-old brother who asked
+the question, as he closed his Latin dictionary.
+
+"Why, this subject. Miss Parsons is always thinking of hard things. She
+wants us to write about heroism. Something that we think would be real
+grand, you know! I can't think of anything grand."
+
+"Why don't you tell a true story of a hero?"
+
+"I don't know any."
+
+"I'll give you one; tell about John Maynard."
+
+"John Maynard, who was he?"
+
+"He was a pilot on Lake Erie; a good man, and a grand man, I think.
+Don't you remember hearing father tell the story of the burning boat?"
+
+"I don't believe I ever heard of it."
+
+"Well, he was bringing a steamer from Detroit to Buffalo, and the
+first thing they knew great puffs of black smoke were coming up from
+somewhere. A man was ordered below to see about it, and he reported
+the ship on fire. Then there was all awful time, the captain shouting
+orders, and the people running in every direction to obey them, and the
+passengers streaming. To make matters worse, the boat was loaded with
+tar and resin; they soon saw that there was no hope of saving her.
+
+"They were only about seven miles from land, and could make it in three
+quarters of an hour; but, mind you, where the pilot stood, the fire
+was growing hotter and hotter. They crowded forward, passengers and
+sailors, only John Maynard; there he stood, with the flames bursting
+out all around him, and the heat getting fiercer every minute. Suppose
+he had gone forward too? The captain kept shouting out to know whether
+he could stand it, and he would answer, 'Ay, ay, sir!'
+
+"The fire grew hotter, and hotter, and it grew every minute more
+terrible for John Maynard. Only five minutes more, and if the pilot
+could stand it, they would reach the shore. There he stood at his
+wheel, his hands blistered, his face scorched, working away at his
+wheel.
+
+"'John Maynard!' the captain shouted, putting up his trumpet, 'Can you
+hold on five minutes longer?'
+
+"And this is what he answered, Fanny,—
+
+"'By the help of God I will, sir.'
+
+"One hand burned so that he could not use it any more; his hair was all
+burned from his head, yet there he stood, and guided the boat to the
+shore. And everybody on that boat was saved. But he gave his life for
+it, he fell overboard dead, just as his work was done.
+
+"He was a hero, Fanny."
+
+"Yes," said Fanny, in a low voice, "I think was. I can write that
+story. I'm sure Miss Parsons will think that was heroism. I like it for
+another thing, Allen, I don't believe John Maynard could have done that
+if he hadn't been a good man, one who asked God for help: he would have
+been afraid to die."
+
+"Well, I don't know, perhaps not," her brother said, but he went away
+with a sober face; he liked the idea of being a hero, but if it took
+a Christian to make a hero, as Fanny said, then he knew he was not
+preparing for one.
+
+                            ══════════
+
+
+
+                         SOMEBODY'S TROUBLE.
+
+  "Come, you little maiden, hush awhile your fretting,—
+   Surely you have trouble with your ribbons, and your rings,
+   And trouble with the rain,—which always is forgetting
+   That you want to go to church,—and with many other things.
+
+  "Why, the first thing in the morning, if spring chance to be the season,
+   After trouble with awaking, there is trouble with the dew;
+   Yes, the May dew 'is' the meanest, and there ought to be no reason
+   Why, to make your face look fairer, it should have to wet your shoe.
+
+  "You have trouble with the sun, which, instead of being pleasant—
+   Only pleasant, nothing further—is too gracious with his heat;
+   And there's trouble with the moon, which is sometimes just a crescent,
+   When it 'should' shine full and golden through the shadow at your feet.
+
+  "You have trouble with the blossoms, which keep lying close and curly,
+   Afraid of wind, and all that, although you want to wear
+   A bud of rose or violet, that's 'out' a little early,
+   To some beautiful pert party, in your muslins and your hair.
+
+  "You have trouble, through your books, with some hundred thousand cities,
+   With a spicy lot of islands and a stormy set of seas;
+   With your moods, sometimes imperative; and certainly one pities
+   A golden head so sadly vexed with unknown quantities.
+
+  "You have trouble with all nations too, through history or tradition,
+   With their manners, dress, religions, with their kings and with their wars;
+   And perhaps, somewhat remotely, through the telescopic vision
+   Of Professor This, or That, you have trouble with the stars.
+
+  "Now, since you must have trouble, since to bear it you seem able,
+   (I fancy even trouble, may be made a little sweet),
+   Suppose you take your trouble and arrange it on the table;
+   Let the china, glass, and silver show that trouble can be neat.
+
+  "Suppose you try with trouble, if you cannot please the baby;
+   He has many a petty failure, and many a grievous loss;
+   And suppose you dust a chair or two, as charmingly as may be,
+   And suppose you teach a housemaid just how not to be 'cross.'"
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+                        SOME YOUNG HEROINES.
+
+THERE was to be a grand picnic on the Fourth of July up in Mr. Paxton's
+woods; a school picnic to which all the scholars, old and young, were
+invited. There was a great deal of planning to be done, and among
+other questions that came up, was that old one which has always to be
+talked over, as to what they were all going to wear. Half a dozen of
+them or more, met one evening at Fanny Easton's on the croquet lawn and
+discussed the matter.
+
+"I shall wear my new Swiss mull," said Cora Lewis.
+
+Now Cora was one of the best dressed girls in the school, and the rest
+always liked to follow her example as far as they could. They looked
+at each other in some dismay. If she was going to wear such an elegant
+dress as her new Swiss mull, what "should" they select to match it.
+
+"I think I shall have to wear my summer silk," said Alice Wilmot,
+speaking somewhat faintly, "I suppose it is not very good taste to wear
+silk to a picnic, and mamma will not approve of it much, I'm afraid,
+but still I haven't another decent thing."
+
+"I shall wear my buff organdie with blue ribbons," Estelle Porter
+said, and the girls, who knew how lovely the organdie was, and how
+exactly the blue ribbons matched her hair, could imagine what a picture
+Estelle, the beauty, would be.
+
+Meantime Faith Halsted had not said a word; her face was quiet and
+thoughtful, and at last they, noticing her stillness, called out,
+"Faith, Faith Halsted what are you going to wear? You are getting up
+something to outshine us all, I do believe, and that is what keeps you
+so still."
+
+Then Faith laughed. "I shall wear my new blue sprigged calico dress,
+and thick boots," she said brightly. "If you think that will be
+outshining the rest of you, I just hope you will follow my example."
+
+Oh, what a chorus of eager and rather indignant voices there was then!
+
+"Now Faith Halsted, I think that is real mean!" "O, Faithie, you
+'can't' mean it!" "But Faith, what are you going to do that for, when
+you have such lovely dresses?" "Faith, does your mother agree to that
+way of dressing?" These are some of the exclamations and questions.
+
+Then Faith sat down on a mossy bank and clasped her two pretty hands,
+and spoke her reasons. "Well girls, I'll tell you; you know Carrie
+Morris? Well, she is one of the sweetest girls in our class, I think,
+as well as one of the best scholars. She will have to be rather
+prominent that day, you know, because she stands so high in class.
+Now, I happen to know that she hasn't a nice thin dress in the world;
+her father has been sick all the spring, and they have just had to do
+without things. Carrie has a light calico, neatly made; she looks as
+fresh as a daisy in it, and I know she means to wear it. I've been
+thinking how unpleasant it would be for her to be in common calico, and
+all the rest of us dressed in our best, and I just decided to wear my
+new calico; mamma is willing; so now, you have my reasons."
+
+Nobody seemed to be quite ready with an answer to this; they all stood
+and stared at each other, or looked off to sea for a few minutes. Then,
+suddenly, Cora Lewis came to the front.
+
+"I'll tell you what it is, girls, let's do a new thing, and astonish
+everybody. We each have pretty calicoes, nicely made, let's wear them
+to the picnic; then people won't be staring at those two girls and
+wondering about it."
+
+I told you Cora Lewis was a leader; the girls were all ready to be led;
+they clapped their hands over the new idea, and voted at once that it
+should be done. It was so new an idea to these fashionably-dressed
+people, and struck them so pleasantly, that, after all, I am not sure
+there was a heroine among them, except little five-year-old Lolly
+Porter. The tears were actually in her eyes when she said it, but she
+struggled to speak in a brave voice.
+
+"Then I won't wear my new fancy top gaiters, but just my every day
+shoes, so Trudie Baker won't cry because she has to wear patched ones."
+
+"Bless her little heart," exclaimed several voices, and Lolly was
+kissed until the tears turned to smiles.
+
+"What are you girls talking about?" said Cora's handsome young brother,
+putting his head in among the group.
+
+"Common sense," said Faith Halsted.
+
+"Yes, and what's more, we are going to 'live' it, as well as talk it,"
+added Estelle Porter. And they did.
+
+                            ══════════
+
+
+
+                       A LITTLE WHITE CASKET.
+
+SHE was just as cross us anybody that you can imagine. Not the little
+girl by the sofa with the dollies; oh no, that is Cora, she was very
+quiet and pleasant; a little bit disappointed, but bearing it bravely.
+
+It was Emma, the older sister, who was hopelessly cross. She kicked the
+kitten and turned it out of the room.
+
+And when Cora begged, she said, "No, indeed; did she suppose she
+was going to have that horrid little kitten under her heels all the
+afternoon?"
+
+Then she sat down in the large rocker to nurse her wrath. With whom was
+Emma angry? Well, truth to tell, she would not have quite liked to own.
+She had had a heavy disappointment; a splendid meeting there was down
+town this very afternoon; a missionary meeting, and a real China-man in
+costume was to be there, and a little Japanese girl, and she, Emma, was
+to have read the report of their Band, and was one of the singers; so
+was Cora, for that matter, and here they both had to stay at home.
+
+"Such perfect nonsense," said Emma to herself, rocking back and forth
+angrily. "Just a little sprinkle of rain that wouldn't hurt a kitten!
+Mamma is 'so' afraid of Cora; I know it isn't going to rain any more.
+Just because she has had the measles, she must be cooped up at home,
+and I have to stay with her. Other children who have had the measles
+caper about, and don't mind rain nor any thing; I think it just is too
+bad. Mamma might have stayed herself."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+She didn't mean that last; she knew her mamma was the presiding officer
+and "must" be there, if it were a possible thing, and really she
+wouldn't have had her stay in her place for "anything;" but it was such
+a relief to think cross things. As she glommed over it, and thought how
+all the rest of the Band girls would be there, and how much they would
+miss her voice in the singing, and how horridly Alice Parker would be
+likely to read the report that she had written so carefully, she kept
+growing crosser every minute.
+
+So when Cora, tired of her dolls, and lonely without the kitten,
+and trying to be brave without mamma, and bear her own great big
+disappointment es well as she could, came and leaned against her
+sister's chair, and proposed that they practise their duet so as to
+play it beautifully for mamma, she was pushed not very gently away.
+
+"No, indeed; she never wanted to hear that silly little duet again; it
+was too babyish for a girl like her anyway; she wasn't 'going' to play
+it, ever. For her part, she wished she could ever play anything, or go
+anywhere, or do anything like other girls, without being always tied to
+a little baby."
+
+Then she flounced out of the room, shut the door behind her, and sat
+down on the lowest steps of the side piazza, where Cora could not come
+because of the dampness. Here she meant to have a good time going over
+all her grievances. She was right in the midst of them, her face as
+gloomy as night, when the solemn "toll, toll, toll" of a bell made her
+look up and down the street, and wonder if there was a funeral coming.
+Yes, there was the hearse, drawn by white horses, and with white plumes
+all around it; some little child in the white casket inside; then a
+long line of carriages followed, slowly, slowly, oh, so solemnly.
+
+"Who is dead?" This question she asked of Carrie Phillips as she
+stopped at the gate to wait for the procession to pass.
+
+"Oh, Emma Barstow! Didn't you go, after all? I didn't either; don't
+you think, I missed the train. But then I don't care, it was because
+brother Aleck came home unexpectedly. Why, that little bit of a
+Marshall girl is dead; don't you remember her? They live away up on
+Selwyn avenue."
+
+"What, that little curly-haired girl?"
+
+"Yes; the one that looks like your Cora. I went to see her, after she
+died, and she did look just exactly like her."
+
+"I didn't know she was sick," said Emma with a little shiver. "What was
+the matter with her?"
+
+"Why, she had the measles, you know; she got all well; then she took
+cold, and they went to her lungs, or something, and she didn't live but
+a few hours. Oh Emma, Aleck brought me some lovely presents."
+
+"I must go right in to Cora," said Emma, rising suddenly, her face as
+white us the dress she wore. She trembled so that she could hardly get
+across the piazza. That little thing who looked "exactly like" their
+Cora, being carried by in a white casket, on her way to Laurel hill.
+It might have been their Cora. Her heart stood still while she thought
+of it, and of all the hard thoughts she had had about staying with her
+darling sister.
+
+What a sister she was for the rest of that day! The first thing she did
+when she came in, was to seize upon Cora and hug and kiss her until the
+little thing was almost smothered. Then she was ready for anything. The
+duet? Why, she was willing to play it through twenty times; she would
+dress and undress all the dolls; she called in the kitten and let it
+climb on her shoulder and paw at her hair; and every few minutes she
+kissed Cora, and called her "Emma's darling pet."
+
+"Emma was just as good and sweet as two angels," explained Cora
+earnestly, when the mother came home; and not a word said the forgiving
+little girl about the first half hour of misery when the cat was
+kicked, and everything went wrong.
+
+"I am very glad," said the Mother, with a relieved sigh; "Emma was
+disappointed, and I was afraid she would not be able to rally. She is a
+dear girl."
+
+And Emma, with quivering lip, and face that was still pale, felt that
+she could hardly wait until Cora was asleep, for a chance to confess
+to her mother, about that first miserable half hour, and how the slow
+tolling bell and the little white casket recalled her to her senses.
+
+                            ══════════
+
+
+
+                            HOUSEKEEPING.
+
+                        BY REV. G. R. ALDEN.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+   THEY built their nests in a shady nook,
+     Where the trees were all fresh and green,
+   Where never a lad had been known to look,
+   Or to hide him to read either paper or book,
+   Or a hunter had stopped his dinner to cook
+     Of meat, either fat or lean.
+
+   Two loving birdies, indeed, were they,
+     Each willing to do his share.
+   With a welcome song would they greet the day,
+   And as happily "work" as if it were "play,"
+   And never for once caused any delay
+     Till their nest was done, I declare.
+
+   But why build a nest with so much care?
+     As soon a boy's pocket unused!
+   So into this nest, so soft and fair,
+   One laid little eggs, so round and rare,
+   Then patiently, constantly waited there,
+     Though 't was dull, she never refused!
+
+   But one fine morn, the time to awake,
+     There something happened that I must tell:
+   'Twas just as the day began to break
+   When the little shells began to shake;
+   And I'm so glad, for birdies' sake!
+     For what was within each shell?
+
+   Why, a little birdie, as you must know.
+     Three sisters and a brother
+   In that sweet nest were there to grow
+   A little each day, though very slow;
+   While parents keep flying to and fro,
+     Each trying to help the other.
+
+   May you in your home as happy be,
+     In work, or study, or play.
+   Taking each kindness as thankfully,
+   Waiting God's time as patiently,
+   Doing each duty as faithfully
+     As the birdies up in that tree!
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+                         THE OLD ARM-CHAIR.
+
+I DO not know that this story would ever have been written, had it not
+been for Rupert Strong, who really was not "strong" at all, but a very
+weak boy because he could not resist the temptation to do mean things.
+
+One night grandmother Burchard left her dear old arm-chair out on the
+side porch, and in the morning it was gone.
+
+Battered and bruised was the old chair, yet how Grandmother Burchard
+loved it. It had been young when she was, and had come home to the
+new house with her, a bride. And "father," as for fifty years she had
+called Mr. Burchard, always sat in it at family worship, and when he
+read the newspaper, and took his little after-dinner naps. Only once
+since "father" went to heaven, ten years before, had she left the chair
+on the porch, forgotten.
+
+One time was enough fur Rupert Strong. He thought it would be "funny"
+to drag the old chair away, tie Jonas Barker's great yellow cat to it,
+and send it floating down stream. "Another Moses in the bulrushes,"
+chuckled Rupert.
+
+This plan was never carried out, for the reason, among others, that
+Jonas Barker's cat was not to be found. Rupert got tired of dragging
+the chair around with him, and finally left it in the grove through
+which he passed on his way home.
+
+There it was that Ralph Burns found it nearly a week after it had been
+stolen. He knew the chair at once; he had often sat in it and eaten one
+of Grandmother Burchard's cookies. He dragged it home, a poor, forlorn
+chair. Rain had soaked it through and through. Wind had rolled it over
+and over, and battered and bruised it on every side, and two of the
+rounds were gone entirely. Whether the birds carried them away for
+fishing-rods, or what became of them. Ralph never knew. Ralph's heart
+swelled with indignation.
+
+Rupert's attempt at "fun" had tickled him so much,—the plan that he
+meant to carry out and didn't,—that he told it to some of his friends,
+and the story leaked out.
+
+So Ralph, when he found the old chair, had no trouble in deciding how
+it got to the woods. "I'll tell you what it is," he said to his mother
+that evening, "I know a bit of fun worth a dozen of Rupert's plans;
+wouldn't it be nice to take that old chair to Mr. Rice and get him to
+fix it up; put on a new head-piece, and new rounds, and paint it, and
+all, and then take it back to her?"
+
+"I'm afraid it would cost almost as much as a new chair," said his
+mother.
+
+"Well, but if it did, it is worth more than all the new chairs in the
+country to Grandmother Burchard. I've got a dollar; I should think that
+might fix it up nice; you wouldn't mind having me spend my dollar in
+that way, would you?"
+
+"I don't think I would," said his mother.
+
+I want you to understand, that in her secret heart she was very much
+pleased with Ralph for having thought of such a kind, unselfish thing
+to do, but of course she didn't want to tell him so.
+
+Mary, however, Ralph's sister, was not so quiet. "I think that is a
+real nice plan." she said, decidedly, "and I mean to make a cushion for
+it; that crimson shawl that you said was too worn-out to do anything
+with, would make a splendid cushion, mother."
+
+And the mother agreed that it would.
+
+"Very well," said Grandmother Burns, from her handsome chair in the
+corner; "I'll knit her a tidy for it, such as we used to knit in the
+old times."
+
+Every one of these plans was carried out,—secretly, too.
+
+Grandmother Burchard had given up talking about her dear old chair;
+many a time though she sat in her straight, high-backed one, and
+thought about it. I have neglected to tell you that she was poor, so
+far as chairs and things of that kind were concerned. She was rich
+enough; being one of the people described in the second chapter of
+James, fifth verse.
+
+One lovely summer afternoon the chair was done, glistening with paint,
+glowing in a red cushion all over its back and seat; gleaming with
+a white tidy, made after the pretty pattern of forty years ago; and
+Ralph put it in his hand-cart, and trundled along over the hill with it
+towards Grandmother Burchard's little cottage. It was a great pleasure
+of course to him, to meet Rupert Strong, who stared at the chair, not
+recognizing it, and said, "My eyes! Ain't that a beauty!"
+
+Ah, but what did Grandmother Burchard say? You won't be disappointed, I
+hope, to hear that the first thing she did was to cry.
+
+"I'll tell you what it is," she said to Ralph, when she was quieted
+down a bit; "the angels came all around that chair once, and stood
+and waited; and it's my opinion they've set store by it ever since,
+and that's the reason you were told to do such a thing as this, for
+Grandmother Burchard; and your dollar bills are none of the plentiest
+either, bless your heart."
+
+"Angels!" said Ralph, with wide open astonished eyes.
+
+"Yes, angels. Father was sitting right in that chair, reading in his
+Bible, when they come after him; and I make no doubt that they waited
+for him to finish his chapter, for he said, with his eyes on his book,
+'Wait a bit.'
+
+"And I said, 'What did you say, father?'
+
+"But dear heart, he wasn't speaking to me, and they waited, for he
+finished his chapter, with his finger on the last verse, and then laid
+back his head, and then I went in a hurry to see what was the matter.
+They had taken him away! Oh, the dear chair! I hope they'll find me
+sitting right here in it, when they come for me."
+
+That evening Ralph sat at home, with thoughtful face, and worked at a
+problem; not being able to get the answer, he went to his father for
+help.
+
+"Father, you know about the old chair?"
+
+"I should think I did," said his father, laughing.
+
+"Well, you know how Rupert stole it, and all; now I was thinking, ought
+he to get a blessing, too, such as Grandmother Burchard says people get
+for kind things? Because, you know, if he hadn't stolen it, we'd never
+have thought of making it over new?"
+
+"Do you suppose he stole it to please Grandmother Burchard, my boy?"
+
+"Why, of course not."
+
+"Then you will find the answer to your question in the 23d chapter of
+Proverbs, the 7th verse."
+
+And Ralph, who rushed for the Bible, found this:
+
+"As he thinketh in his heart, so is he."
+
+                            ══════════
+
+
+
+                               BROKEN.
+
+"AREN'T they just 'lovely!'" As she said this, Estelle Brownson held
+the quaint, dark blue cream-pitcher aloft, to show how transparent it
+was.
+
+"Oh, they are too pretty for 'anything!'" declared Frances Holmes, her
+dear friend and companion, and she wound her arms caressingly around a
+dark blue plate, as she spoke. "I don't believe another girl in our set
+can bring such a charming array of old things as you can. How came your
+grandmother to let you take them?"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"I'm sure I don't know; I didn't expect it; she thinks so much of them.
+Grandpa bought them, you know, when they first commenced housekeeping,
+sixty years ago. Just think, Frances, of having been a housekeeper for
+sixty years! I didn't expect to be allowed to touch these dishes, but
+I was telling mamma about the plans for the old folks' supper, how we
+were going to have all the nice old-fashioned things we could get, for
+the table. And I was complaining that our things were so distressingly
+'new;' when grandma said,—
+
+"'I suppose you would like the blue china tea-set to dress out your
+table with.'
+
+"I gave a little scream, and said I guessed I would, better than
+anything else in the world. And when she said I might take it, I gave
+her such a hugging as to almost take her breath away. I wouldn't have
+one of the pieces broken for 'anything;' I'm really afraid it would
+break grandma's heart. I've been nervous all the morning, while I was
+wiping them and getting them ready. I shut Tiny up in the nursery for
+fear she would break something."
+
+But somebody had let Tiny out of the nursery; she came skipping over
+the ground just at this moment, her heart full of some scheme of
+importance.
+
+"Oh, Stella!" she said, as she came within hearing. "Mamma says I may
+go to the supper, and that she will dress me up in white pantalets, and
+a long-sleeved, high-necked white apron, just as little girls used to
+dress ever so many years ago. Won't I look too funny!"
+
+And the happy little girl whirled on one foot, and came up with a thud
+against her sister just as she was turning to set the cream-pitcher
+down. Down it went, not on the table, but on the hard floor, and of
+course it broke, in—I don't know how many pieces.
+
+Poor little Tiny! How suddenly the happy light went from her eyes, and
+her face grew pale.
+
+But Estelle did not see it; all she saw was the cream-pitcher in
+hopeless ruins. "You naughty, careless, wicked girl!" she exclaimed,
+her voice hoarse with anger. "You hit my arm on purpose; I know you
+did! You are a perfect little nuisance! Always in the way; the idea
+of your bunting up against me in that manner! You ought to be whipped
+severely, and I'll tell mother so; see if I don't. Come into the house
+this minute!"
+
+And she seized the arm of her frightened little sister, and dragged her
+up the steps, and through the hall in frantic haste. It was hours after
+that, in the cool of the afternoon, that Estelle knocked softly at the
+door of grandmother's room, then slipped in and sat down in a sorrowful
+little heap at her feet.
+
+"Oh, grandma!" she said. "Have they told you? I'm so 'awfully' sorry! I
+could cry for a week if that would only mend it."
+
+"So am I, child," said grandma, knitting away quietly on her red and
+white stocking; "I would cry, too, if that would do any good; but tears
+will not mend them; there were so many of them broken, too: that seems
+to make it worse."
+
+Then Estelle lifted her sorrowful face. "Oh, grandma!" she said. "There
+was only one broken: that was bad enough; did you think there were
+more?"
+
+Grandma gravely shook her white old head. "You are mistaken," she said,
+"there was more than one, child; I was in the sitting-room at the
+time, and heard the crash. Let me see, 'Bear ye one another's burden.'
+That was broken, I'm sure: poor little Tiny had to bear her own heavy
+burden. Then, 'Be ye kind, one to another, tender-hearted, forgiving
+one another;' I'm afraid that was dreadfully broken. Oh, there were a
+good many of them; I felt them rattling about my ears all the morning."
+
+Not another word said Estelle. For ten whole minutes she buried her
+head in grandmother's apron.
+
+Then grandmother said softly, "Take them to 'Him,' child, and try
+again."
+
+                            ══════════
+
+
+
+                           CHARLIE SMYTHE.
+
+"LOOK here, old fellow," said Eugene Cooper, as soon as the boys were
+seated under their favorite tree, "you haven't peeped yet; it is high
+time you give us an account of some of your adventures."
+
+"I told you I didn't go but twenty-four miles," said Charlie, chewing a
+clover top.
+
+"Never mind that," chorused the boys, "tell us where you went and what
+you saw."
+
+"I went to Adams' birthplace."
+
+"What Adam?" asked George Dunlap. "John Quincy, or Samuel; or, no, it
+can't be that you went to Eden, where Adam the apple-eater began life!"
+
+"I don't mean those Adams," laughed Charlie, "I means the second
+president of the United States."
+
+"Oh, I declare I don't know where he was born."
+
+"Oh, well it isn't a very remarkable place, and there wasn't a great
+deal to see; but I liked it because John was born there. It was at
+Quincy, Massachusetts, or Braintree, as they used to call it."
+
+"Did the people have lots of stories to tell about Adams, when he was
+a boy? That's what they talk about, when you go to great people's
+birthplaces."
+
+"I heard about his getting tired of Latin and wanted to give up the
+idea of an education, and how his father cured him."
+
+"I don't remember any such thing," declared two of the boys.
+
+"Nor I," said Horace Brooke; "tell us about it."
+
+"Why, he was about fifteen; and he hated Latin. One day, he decided
+that he could not study it any longer, and he went to his father and
+told him, he did not like study, and wanted to go to work."
+
+"'Very well,' his father said, and set him to work digging a ditch.
+'See if ditching suits you, since Latin doesn't,' he said.
+
+"But it didn't suit; by noon, he hated it worse than the Latin grammar;
+and by night he thought he had never been so tired in his life. He
+would have liked to go back to school the next morning, but he was too
+proud to give up, so he worked in the ditch for another day. At night,
+though, he told his father he would like to leave the ditch, and try
+the grammar again."
+
+The boys all laughed, and Horace said he would have chosen ditching
+rather than Latin.
+
+"Well, Adams became a fine scholar, even when he was young man," said
+George Dunlap.
+
+"Yes," said Charlie, "he did. And a statesman, too; why, when he was
+only nineteen he wrote that letter, you know, which hinted that he
+believed this country would set up for itself. What a brilliant man he
+was! A lawyer, and a foreign minister, and a vice-president, and then
+president. Suppose he had stuck to that ditch, instead! Perhaps we
+should have had no Declaration of Independence."
+
+"Why? He didn't write it."
+
+"Well, he helped write it; and nominated George Washington for
+commander-in-chief of our army."
+
+"When did Adams die?" asked Horace.
+
+"On the Fourth of July, 1826. Wasn't it strange that he and Jefferson
+should die on the same day?"
+
+"Why, did they?"
+
+"Yes; on that Fourth of July, the first semi-centennial celebration.
+They were friends, you know, and lawyers, and makers of the Declaration
+of Independence, and foreign ministers, and presidents, and they died
+together. Adams' last words were, 'Jefferson survives.' It wasn't so,
+though; Jefferson died a few hours before."
+
+"Upon my word, I didn't know much about it," frankly declared George
+Dunlap.
+
+And Eugene Cooper said, "Look here, boys, we haven't heard a word about
+summer vacation travels; this young scamp has been giving us a lesson
+in American history!"
+
+"Which we seemed to need," said one.
+
+And then they all laughed, only Charlie, his face was grave; he was
+still thinking of John Adams.
+
+"After all," he said, "I wish he had said something better than that
+to die by; he was a great man. But when my grandfather died, his last
+words were, 'I know that my Redeemer liveth.' And those were better
+words for last ones than anything that Adams said."
+
+"I guess," said Horace Brooks, getting up from the grass, and shaking
+the dried leaves from his clothes, speaking slowly and gravely
+meanwhile, "I guess you've got to 'live' things, or you can't 'say'
+them when you come to die."
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+                       GRANDMOTHER BROWNSON.
+
+"IT is just wonderful to hear her read in the Bible," said Estelle,
+talking about her grandmother, as she was fond of doing. "It doesn't
+matter how dull a chapter you pick out, she is sure to have some sweet
+new thought about it. I wish I loved to read it as well as she does;
+and knew half as much about it. I don't believe you could pick out a
+place, from which she wouldn't give you a new thought."
+
+"I do," declared Stuart Harper, who was leaning against the door,
+pulling yellow roses to pieces, and scattering the leaves on the
+piazza. Stuart was one of those boys who are always picking things to
+pieces. "My small brother was stumbling through a lot of hard names in
+his Bible-reading this morning, just because they belonged to the next
+chapter in his course; and I said to mother that I didn't believe there
+was any good to be gotten out of a list of names, if they 'were' in the
+Bible; I don't believe even your grandmother could make anything of
+them."
+
+"Let's try her," exclaimed Estelle, "she is in her room with her
+knitting. She is always ready to read to us; let us all go in and ask
+her to read that chapter. Can you find the place, Stuart?"
+
+No sooner thought of, than the whole troop of grandchildren with Tiny
+at their heels, and Stuart Harper, and Francis Holmes, following more
+quietly, started for grandmother's room. She received them cordially,
+in no way surprised, for she was used to many visits from the young
+people. Neither did it astonish her to be asked to read; this was a
+favorite Sabbath afternoon entertainment, and grandmother saw no reason
+why it should not be as pleasant a thing on Tuesday, as on the Sabbath.
+
+"Stuart wants you to read from the first chapter of Numbers, beginning
+at the fifth verse," explained Estelle, "he wants to ask you some
+questions about it."
+
+So grandmother read: "'And these are the names of the men that shall
+stand with you: of the tribe of Reuben, Elizur the son of Shedeur; of
+Simeon, Shelumiel the son of Zurishaddai; of Judah, Nahshon the son of
+Amminadab; of Issachar, Nethaneel the son of Zuar; of Zebulun, Eliab
+the son of Helon.'
+
+"I never read over these names," said grandmother, looking up over her
+spectacles, "but I think of your father; when he was a little boy, he
+liked to read them, and to imagine how he should feel if he should read
+there, 'Tommy, the son of Jeremiah.' That was your grandfather's name,
+you know; and your father said, he knew he should hold up his head
+proudly at the thought of being the son of such a good man as Jeremiah.
+
+"'But mother,' says he, 'what if father couldn't hold up his head, when
+my name was called, because he was ashamed of me.'"
+
+And grandma laughed, and at the same moment wiped a tear out of her
+faded eyes, and went on with her reading.
+
+"'Of the children of Joseph: of Ephraim, Elishama the son of Ammihud;
+of Manasseh, Gamaliel the son of Pedahzur.'"
+
+Then she looked up again. "Did you ever think, children, what a
+beautiful thing it is that the Lord knows us so well he can call all
+our names? I love to think of him as speaking of my children and
+grandchildren, and setting them their tasks to do for him."
+
+It was a solemn thought, as well as a sweet one, and ought to have
+sobered them. The grandchildren were quiet, but Stuart could not resist
+the temptation to clap his hands. This made grandma look up in wonder,
+and then the whole story came out.
+
+"But I still think," said Stuart, "that it would take a woman like
+grandmother, to find the crumb in such verses as those."
+
+"Read on, my boy," said grandmother, "read on to the last verse:
+
+"'And the children of Israel did according to all that the Lord
+commanded.'
+
+"Are these children doing so?"
+
+                            ══════════
+
+
+
+                       A FOOLISH LITTLE GIRL.
+
+SHE was washed and partly dressed, and set up high and dry in a safe
+place while Mrs. Stuart went for more clothes. Her name was Margary,
+and she had been picked up in the streets. Mrs. Stuart meant to dress
+her neatly, and teach her to read, and sew, and sweep, and dust; in
+short, teach her how to be a useful girl, and earn her own living. They
+had made a queer beginning.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"Do you know how to wash yourself?" she had asked the dirty little
+girl, when she first brought her home.
+
+"Yes 'm," said Margary, with twinkling eyes.
+
+And as she seemed to know a great deal, for a little girl of her age,
+Mrs. Stuart had taken her to the bath-room and showed her how to draw
+the water, and where to put the towels, and the soaps, and had left her
+to herself, to see what kind of a bath she would take.
+
+"I really didn't feel as though I could touch the little thing, until
+she got her dreadful rags, and some of the dirt off," said Mrs. Stuart
+in telling about it, afterwards.
+
+One thing she forgot, that was to lock the door that lead from the
+bath-room into Miss Emma's dressing-room. What do you think little
+Margery did but slip in there!
+
+It was lovely there, she thought, and she roved around looking at
+everything. On the bed lay Miss Emma's white dress, fresh from the
+laundry, where its many ruffles, and puffs, and tucks, had been
+carefully fluted and pressed; "a good half-day's work," Nelly, the
+ironing-girl, said it was. Also there lay, near at hand, a lovely new
+garden hat, trimmed with white tarlatan, and a pair of high-heeled
+French slippers with stockings to match Miss Emma's ribbons. That very
+afternoon she was going to a garden party, and her dress was laid out,
+ready for her to put on. She had gone to the garden to pick just the
+sort of flowers that she needed for a wreath, and in the meantime,
+Margery had slipped in.
+
+"Oh, my!" she said. "How perfectly splendid!"
+
+Then she set to work; the beautiful tucked skirt and elegant white
+dress were slipped on, over her rags and dirt; they trailed on the
+floor, but what of that? Margery thought that more becoming than short
+dresses. Then she sat down on the floor, and drew on the delicate
+stockings over her dirty bare legs, and slipped into the French
+slippers, and perched the garden hat on the back of her naughty head,
+drew on the gloves, seized the delicate parasol with dirty fingers, and
+began to parade up and down the room.
+
+Imagine what Miss Emma said when she came in and caught her! Imagine
+what Mrs. Stuart said when she was summoned to see this dirty little
+girl, prinked up in borrowed feathers! Do you wonder that she took
+Margery in hand herself, gave her a bath in haste, burned her dirty
+clothes, then dressing her in the clean ones, perched her high up on a
+table near at hand, with orders not to stir until she came back?
+
+There Margery sat, looking somewhat cross, and disappointed; she liked
+the fine clothes better than these.
+
+But I wanted to tell you what Mrs. Stuart said to her daughter Emma
+that evening. You must know that Miss Emma grew very cross indeed, over
+the fact that she could not wear the lovely new stockings, after they
+had been drawn on Margary's naughty little limbs, and over the horrible
+discovery that one of her gloves was hopelessly soiled. She wished that
+poor Margary was back in the cellar, from which she had been dragged,
+and declared that her mother was very foolish to try to make anything
+of the little beggar.
+
+"The poor child thought she could cover up her soiled and worthless
+rags by your beautiful dress," said Mrs. Stuart, with a sigh, "and
+Emma, dear, mother is sometimes afraid that you are covering a sadly
+soiled heart with a pretty body, and thinking, like poor foolish
+Margery, that it is all right, because the soil is covered from human
+eyes."
+
+                            ══════════
+
+
+
+                          FLORENCE AT HOME.
+
+IT was Sabbath morning, and she was standing before the glass, tying
+the ends of her lovely, new sash; and Carrie leaned on her elbows and
+watched her for a minute, then looked at nothing, and wished that
+she was a little more like Florence. She was pretty, and bright, and
+everybody admired her. This very morning she was going to do something
+so nice! In the next square was a new family, just moved in; Florence
+had already become acquainted with Weston, the fifteen-year-old son,
+and invited him to attend Sabbath-school, and he had laughed, and
+declared that he didn't go to Sunday-school very often; but at last had
+agreed to call, and be shown the way to the church by Florence.
+
+"I don't believe they are people who go to church much," Florence
+had said, as she drew on her long mitts with a pleased air, "but I
+shouldn't be surprised if I could get him in the habit of going."
+
+And then Carrie had sighed, and wished that she could do anything; here
+she had to stay poked in the house this beautiful day, because she had
+a sore throat; she was always getting sore throats.
+
+"That is all I can do," she told herself drearily, "get a sore throat,
+and a swelled nose, and red eyes, and stay in the house."
+
+Just then the deer-bell rang, and Master Weston's voice was heard in
+the hall.
+
+Then was Florence in a flutter. "Dear me! There he is, and it is time
+we were off. Where is my handkerchief? Carrie, haven't you seen my
+handkerchief? You certainly must have taken it; I laid it right here.
+I 'do wish' you would let my things alone! Mamma, have you seen my
+Quarterly? I thought it was on the table; where 'can' it be! Oh, dear
+me, mamma, I 'should' think you might help me find it. I 'hate' to
+be late. Oh, never mind my money, I can take it next Sunday; mamma,
+'please' don't keep me waiting to get it; I shan't go at all, if I have
+to wait much longer. Carrie Marshall, I know you tucked my handkerchief
+somewhere. Mamma, 'won't you please' let me go this minute? You seem to
+just want to make me late. I don't care if my hair is too low down; it
+is just the way all the girls wear it. I wouldn't have it flying around
+my face in the wild way that Carrie does, for 'anything.' Carrie, hand
+me that book, quick! I shall go distracted!"
+
+Then I rejoice to tell you that she went out of the room, tripped down
+the stairs, and was off.
+
+Her invalid mother drew a relieved sigh. "I wish Florence were not such
+an excitable girl," she said, as she moved about picking up many things
+that the young miss in her hurry had sent flying hither and thither.
+"If she were a little more like you, dear, in some things, I should be
+glad."
+
+Meantime, Florence was tripping along beside her new friend, as bright
+as the morning itself. Very anxious she was to be a help to him. She
+was a Christian girl, and wanted to do good. It was not by any means
+"make believe." She told him about their nice Sunday-school, what
+a pleasant superintendent they had, and what a "perfectly splendid
+teacher;" she told him about the young people's prayer-meeting, and
+asked him to attend; and with great sweetness and skill brought her
+question around, until she fairly asked him if he were a Christian. And
+said, earnestly, "I am so sorry," when he told her "no."
+
+Then she said a few sweet, earnest words, that ought to have done him
+good, and she wondered in her heart why it was that he was simply
+polite in return, showing not the slightest interest in the subject.
+
+If she could have looked into "his" heart, she would have found just
+this: "I wonder what this dainty little miss in her pretty hat, and her
+frizzes would say if she knew I waited for her in the hall, while she
+left her room door open, and talked to her mother and 'Carrie'—whoever
+she is. The talk I heard then, and the talk I'm hearing now, don't seem
+to match. How am I to know which she means?"
+
+Poor Florence! Her thoughtless, disrespectful words at home, that
+morning, had spoiled the influence of her work abroad! And the worst
+of it was, she was so used to being careless in this matter, that she
+didn't suspect it.
+
+                            ══════════
+
+
+
+                     MINNIE LEE AND HER KITTEN.
+
+TRAVELLING from Attica to Rochester in New York, some years since,
+I changed cars at Avon. A moment after entering the car, a lady and
+little girl came in and took the seat directly in front of me. The
+child's face was radiant with joy, as she frequently raised the cover
+of a little basket on her arm and looked curiously into it. Her sweet
+little face had no wrinkles of care or unrest.
+
+As I contemplated it, memories of childhood joys and days made me
+feel like a child again. My own curiosity was excited by her constant
+looking, and I leaned forward to ascertain the cause of so much
+happiness.
+
+The little girl, with the quick intuition of childhood, raised the
+cover of her basket and exposed to view a kitten. I said, "that is a
+'beautiful kitten;' what is its name?"
+
+"Daisy," was her quick reply. "I wish you would give me Daisy," I said,
+gently.
+
+"Oh! 'No, sir;' I can't give you Daisy—I love Dairy so much."
+
+"But, Minnie, I 'want' Daisy, and I will give you a dollar for her."
+
+"Oh! No, sir, I can't sell Daisy."
+
+"Do you love candy, Minnie?"
+
+"Yes, sir, I guess I do."
+
+"Well, then, you can get your basket almost full of candy for a dollar."
+
+"Oh, sir, I love Daisy, more than I do money or candy."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+She was so simple and happy, I was confident she had been taught, in
+the Sunday-school and at home, to love the Saviour. I then asked her if
+she went to Sunday-school.
+
+"Yes, sir; I go to Sunday-school always."
+
+"Well, Minnie, do you love the dear Saviour?"
+
+"Why, 'yes, sir; I guess I do. Do you love Jesus?'" was her quick
+retort.
+
+"Yes, my darling, I do, and I'm so glad to know you love the dear
+Saviour. He is our best Friend; he will go with us if we will let him,
+all through life, and love us, and keep us, and save us. By-and-by
+we'll go where Jesus is, and then sin will not hart us any more."
+
+Her little face grew bright with joy, and the light kindled in her
+eyes. Looking at me steadfastly for a little while, she lifted her
+basket, and with the sweetest voice said, "Sir! 'You may have Daisy;
+you may have Daisy.'"
+
+For a moment I hardly knew what reply to make, but said, "No, my
+darling, I can't take Daisy from you."
+
+The tear came to her eye, as she said, "Why won't you take Daisy?"
+
+"Because you love Daisy more, and will take better care of her than I
+can."
+
+I trust this beautiful lesson will not be forgotten—at least by the
+writer. Neither money nor candy could induce the child to give up
+her kitten; but because I loved her dear Saviour, she loved me more
+than her kitten, and was willing to give up her idol to please a
+friend of her Saviour. The atmosphere of heaven is love. Love is the
+vitalizing power which ripens the soul for heaven. Pride, and anger,
+and self-will, cannot live where love is found. Love is unselfish. "God
+is love."
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+                            ONLY A SPARK.
+
+IT was to be a tableau party, and among other tableaux, there was
+to be a bridal scene. Pretty Alice Knowlton had been chosen for the
+bride, because every one said she had the sweetest face of any of the
+girls, and looked "perfectly lovely" dressed in white. She did look
+lovely, with her long bridal veil, and her real orange blossoms from
+Mr. Silover's conservatory, and all of the bridesmaids, as well as Mary
+Lewis, who was waiting maid in general, stood around her, and planned
+and admired, and made little changes here and there to add to the
+effect.
+
+"We must hurry, girls," one of them had just said. "The people are
+getting impatient down-stairs, I hear them in the halls asking when we
+'are' to have another scene."
+
+Just then came Phebe, the little colored errand girl, to say that Mrs.
+Lewis said, that the bridal party must stand at the left of the stage
+instead of the right, because the wind blew the curtains right against
+the gas light when the door was opened on the right.
+
+"Then we will have to tell the gentleman," said Mary Lewis, "that will
+change their position entirely; let's tell Charlie Burns, and he will
+arrange it with the others; run Phebe, and tell Mr. Burns that the
+ladies want to see him a minute in the south room."
+
+"Botheration!" said gentlemanly Charlie when he received the message.
+"What do they want now? They've been planning long enough to be really
+and truly married nine times over. I wonder if I shall have to throw
+away this cigar? It is one of the best I ever tried."
+
+"Take it along with you, Charlie, they only want to ask some question,
+and you can come directly back; I wouldn't sacrifice a good cigar to
+one of their whims."
+
+That was the advice of one of the groomsmen, and Charlie following it,
+crossed the hall from the gentlemen's dressing-room, puffing a cloud of
+smoke into Phebe's face. He held the cigar in his hand, while he talked
+with the ladies, and went to puffing again, the moment the door closed
+after him.
+
+"Ugh!" said the pretty bride, shuddering. "I wouldn't marry Charlie
+Burns in real earnest for anything; I hate cigar-smoke."
+
+Well she might! How was it done? Whose fault was it? Is there anybody
+who can ever give a careful account of the very beginnings of an
+accident? There was a curious smell, a sudden blaze, a scream from
+Phebe who had stooped to shake out the train of the bridal dress,
+a succession of fearful screams that rang through the house, and
+brought crowds of guests, as well as the gentlemen performers from
+the dressing-room, and the only thing about it all that was painfully
+certain, was that the pretty bride was cruelly burned.
+
+It was all talked over a great many times after that; what a sad thing
+it was that she should have put her beautiful arms into the blaze to
+try to crush it out, and burned them so that they were shrivelled and
+useless, and that her limbs were so burned that she could never walk
+again.
+
+Then people would say in whispers,—"They don't 'know' of course, but
+it must have been a spark from Charlie Burns' cigar, it couldn't have
+happened any other way, for she wasn't standing near the gas light, and
+he was there but a minute before, with a lighted cigar in his hand;
+they say poor Charlie feels awfully: he has never smoked a cigar since."
+
+Oh dear me! Small good will that do pretty Alice Knowlton. If he had
+"only" stopped before he smoked that one.
+
+                            ══════════
+
+
+
+                             ROBERT HALL.
+
+IT was a rainy day, and the boys gathered in the hall for their recess
+talk; I don't know but that was why they assured Robert Hall that it
+was his turn.
+
+"I spent every bit of my vacation in Cooperstown," he said, stretching
+himself out on the long bench that was under the west windows.
+
+"Where's Cooperstown?" asked Horace Brooks. "Any of your ancestors own
+the town, Cooper?"
+
+"Not that I know of," said Eugene; "but I know where it is; nice little
+town at the head of Otsego lake; there's a one-horse kind of a railroad
+to take you to it, that connects with the Albany and Susquehanna, or
+you can go by the Delaware and Lackawanna, as far as Richfield Springs,
+then take an old-fashioned ride, in a four-horse stage coach, to the
+head of the lake, and after that as pretty a ride on a lake as can be
+had anywhere in the United States or out of them, I guess."
+
+"Look here," said Robert Hall, good-humoredly, "am I telling this
+story, or are you?"
+
+"I was only giving those dumbheads your bearings, my boy; go ahead."
+
+"Well, I went on the one-horse train; that's a good name for it, I
+declare; a stupider, slower, dustier ride I never took in my life, and
+I've travelled some; but as you say, the town is lovely when you get
+there. Queer old town, made up of hotels, mostly; great buildings,
+large enough, each one of them, to accommodate all the inhabitants as
+boarders; and full to overflowing, summers."
+
+"What takes people there?" asked Horace Brooks. "Springs?"
+
+"Not a spring; the springs are, as Eugene told you, nine miles away;
+it's the beauty, I suppose. Men who have travelled say you won't find
+any better scenery even up the Clyde, or on the Rhine. The lake is
+just like a sheet of glass, and all along it on either side, lovely
+landscapes. I don't know much about that sort of thing myself; but my
+brother paints, you know, and he just raved over it all the time; said
+it was the finest place for sketching he had found in this country.
+
+"I know the echoes are fine. One night we went out, a party of us, as
+late as midnight, when the town was still, and rowed up the lake a
+couple of miles, and then we shouted at the echoes, and the old fellows
+took up our remarks and repeated them seven times!"
+
+"Whew!" said George Dunlap. "That's a very large story."
+
+"That's just as true as I live," said Robert Hall, rising on one elbow,
+earnestly. "I heard them; oh, as plainly as you hear me now. We shouted
+'Natty Bumppo!' and back they yelled 'Natty Bumppo!'
+
+"Then another fellow, from away up among the rocks on the other side
+took it up and shouted 'Natty Bumppo!' And so they kept it going, until
+we had seven distinct voices. I never heard anything like it."
+
+"Where did you get such an outlandish name to call?" asked one of the
+boys.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"Oh, that's one of Cooper's names, you know; in some of his books; 'he'
+is the man who has made Cooperstown famous, I suppose. Wherever you go
+through the town, people are pointing out to you the spot where such
+a scene was laid, and telling you the incident that suggested such
+and such a character; and up in their cemetery,—they have a lovely
+cemetery, terraced up from the lake side, my brother said it was a
+miniature Greenwood, as fine according to its size, as that,—well there
+is a statue, just near the entrance, of Leather Stocking and his dog
+and gun; that's Natty Bumppo. It is erected in memory of Cooper, I
+suppose; thought 'he' isn't buried there."
+
+"Who's Cooper?" asked Charlie Smythe.
+
+"Well, now, my boy, a fellow as well read in history as you are, ought
+to know something about him. J. Fenimore Cooper, at your service; born
+in Burlington, New Jersey, in 1789. Brought up in the wild woods around
+this same Otsego lake, entered Yale college when he was thirteen,
+entered the United States Navy at sixteen, resigned his commission, and
+married when he was twenty-two or so, and went to writing books. You
+see a fellow who visits Cooperstown has to study up on James Fenimore
+Cooper."
+
+"Was he a historian?"
+
+"No, a novelist. Why, he wrote thirty-three novels. It is said he is
+the most popular writer who has ever lived; and his books have been
+translated into about all the languages in Europe. He used to write sea
+stories, splendid ones; I read some of them when I was in Cooperstown;
+and his Natty Bumppo is just a splendid character.
+
+"We went to Cooper's grave in the old cemetery beside the Episcopal
+church. The people are very proud of Cooper; they talk about him half
+the time."
+
+"Where is Cooperstown, anyhow? How far from places that everybody
+knows?" This was Charlie Smythe's question.
+
+"Well, it can't be more than a hundred miles or so, from Albany, New
+York. I started from Albany in the morning, and reached there about
+noon I think. We went to the Cooper House; a great splendid hotel,—full
+of boarders. My brother went to sketch. He has some lovely pictures of
+Cooperstown; if you'll all come home with me in vacation, I'll show
+them to you. 'I' don't know how to describe places. It is a pretty
+village, with a lovely lake and very fine scenery, and that is all I
+can tell you about it."
+
+"You've told us several things," chorused the boys.
+
+"Yes, and given us an invitation besides," laughed George Dunlap. "I
+think you've come out ahead, Hall."
+
+"There's one thing I want to know," said Charlie in his slow,
+meditative way; "does it make people better to read Cooper's novels?"
+
+"I don't know, I am sure," said Robert Hall; "it makes them 'wiser,' I
+guess; but about the better, I'm not so sure."
+
+"Well," said Charlie, "if I had written thirty-three books, and then
+died, and people were reading them yet, I should want them to make
+folks 'better,' as well as wiser."
+
+"That boy Charlie will write books yet, 'I' believe," said Horace, as
+they went into the schoolroom; "and I shouldn't wonder if it would make
+folks better to read them."
+
+
+
+                      A LETTER FROM BIRD-LAND.
+
+DEAR RAY:—Do you want a letter all about birds? I have seen so many
+kinds of birds to-day, and such beautiful ones! Do you remember the
+fountain in the side yard? It has been made larger, and has stones
+put all around the edge, and mosses and ferns and pots of flowers are
+growing everywhere about it.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Every morning the birds come there to bathe; after their bath, they fly
+up on the trees, and pay their bills by singing sweetest songs. Then
+they fly away with the news. I think they say to all their friends,
+"Did you know that, down there in that grass, there is a lovely
+fountain with everything beautiful around it, and don't you think it is
+made on purpose for us to take baths in every day?" So the good news
+spread, and all the birds come flying to the fountain.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+There has been a great time among the birds this spring. Some of them
+must have such large families that they can't take care of them all.
+The other day I was out walking in the yard, and I saw a beautiful
+little bird, too young to fly. I was afraid some cat would get it, so I
+took it in my hands and brought it home. I put it in a bird-cage, and
+what do you think it ate? Why, worms! I had to dig worms, and put them
+down its throat. It seemed never to get enough.
+
+Grandma said, "Oh, I wouldn't keep it in a cage; it was made to be
+free."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+I thought so too, so I opened the cage door and let it go. It hopped
+around on the grass and seemed very happy. All day I watched that no
+cat came near it.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+I had help, too, in taking care of it; every little while a bird would
+come hopping down, and give it something to eat. Sometimes a robin
+would come, then a little sparrow, and now and then a chippy-bird.
+They all seemed to be very kind to it. At last the dark night came,
+and I could see my little birdie no longer; but I remembered it was
+said, "Not a sparrow falleth to the ground without your Heavenly Father
+knoweth it."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+The next morning there was great commotion among the birds; they all
+came to see about something that troubled them. I went, too; and don't
+you think my poor little birdie had been taken care of all night, and
+hopped out in the morning to see about her breakfast, but had been so
+unfortunate as to go near an old hen who had a dozen little chicks.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+The hen knew the birdie was no child of hers, so she began to peck her,
+and would soon have killed her if I had not appeared. I rescued the
+poor trembling little thing, put her on a soft bed, and took care of
+her all day; but at night she died,—the naughty old hen had broken her
+leg.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+I was glad it was a hen who had done the mischief, instead of some
+little boy to whom God had given a soul, and a mind that could
+understand what he has said about the birds. But I have heard of little
+boys who would break up birds' nests, and destroy little families of
+birds.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Some day I am going to pick out and put together all that God has said
+in the Bible about birds; for God cares for them.
+
+             Your loving auntie,
+
+                               "JEWEL."
+
+
+
+[Illustration: WAITING]
+
+                         HARVEY IN TROUBLE.
+
+EMILY HARPER went through the hall singing:
+
+"'And for bonnie Annie Laurie, I'd lay me down, and—'
+
+"What on 'earth' is the matter?"
+
+She did not "sing" that last, but said it in a wondering and dismayed
+tone, as she suddenly opened the library door, and found her brother
+Harvey lying flat on his face, in a perfect storm of tears.
+
+Harvey "crying," was something new under the sun; he hardly ever
+stopped whistling long enough to cry.
+
+He wasn't very gracious to Emily. "Keep away," he said, poking out his
+elbows as though he meant to push her off.
+
+But she wasn't easily pushed off; she shut the library door, and went
+down on her knees beside the heap on the floor, and said in the most
+coaxing of sisterly tones, "Tell me all about it, Harvey."
+
+And Harvey told; he couldn't help it. It was bad enough. At twenty
+minutes of three he had started, a merry, whistling boy, for the
+post-office, to mail a letter for his father,—an important letter; his
+father had called after him that if it failed to reach that mail, there
+would be more than a hundred dollars' loss.
+
+"And he said he would trust me," sobbed poor Harvey.
+
+Well, he knew the mail did not close until fifteen minutes after three,
+and he knew he could reach the office in five minutes; so he laughed at
+the idea of failing, and told his father it should be there "sure."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+But going around the square, he met Joe Bailey, who told him that their
+folks had brought home a parrot with them from the city; the cutest
+fellow, who could whistle, and sing, and say, "Hush up!" And do ever
+so many funny things, and he had gone down the left side of the square
+instead of the right, because he knew it would make no difference in
+the time, and had stopped just about two minutes to look at the parrot.
+
+"And missed the mail!" exclaimed Emily in a horrified tone.
+
+"No, I didn't miss the mail, either," said poor Harvey, very crossly;
+he felt so bad, he thought he couldn't help being cross. "Keep still,
+can't you? 'I'm' telling this story; I didn't forget about the letter
+at all. I didn't stay three minutes; but there came a big wind along,
+and blew off my hat, and I had to climb the picket fence to get it,
+and then I made for the post-office as fast as I could; and when I got
+there, the letter was gone."
+
+Then he told how he went back, and searched all the way, and searched
+the yard at Bailey's, and Joe searched, and the parrot searched, or
+seemed to, but no letter could be found.
+
+"What did father say?" Emily asked, after a moment of dismayed silence.
+
+"That is the worst of it," Harvey said, sitting up with dry eyes,
+feeling too miserable to shed any more tears, "I haven't told him a
+word about it; I don't see any use in telling; the letter is gone, and
+he can't find it, for I looked 'everywhere;' and the mail is gone,
+he can't send another, and I might just as well keep still, and not
+trouble him, to-night at least."
+
+Then Emily found her usual busy tongue. "O, Harvey, that won't do
+at all; maybe he could write another by that very early mail in the
+morning, that would help some; or he might telegraph, or send somebody
+on the train; men know how to do ever so many things. You ought to tell
+father right away. He could do something, I'm sure; and you've 'got' to
+tell him some time; I should think you would want it over."
+
+One word in this sentence carried weight with it. Harvey rose up, his
+face pale. "I forgot all about the telegraph," he said, "I must tell
+him right away."
+
+Now, some people might suppose Mr. Harper was a very fierce man, since
+his son so dreaded to tell him of the accident; but the truth was, if
+there had been nothing but a whipping to dread, Harvey would not have
+wasted so much time nor so many tears. His father was the kindest, most
+patient of men, and Harvey so loved and respected him, that to bring
+trouble, by his carelessness, on that good father, was something that
+he could hardly bear to think of. Besides, they were not rich, and a
+hundred dollars was a good deal of money for them to lose.
+
+Mr. Harper had come home from the office, and was in his room, a
+grave-faced father; he listened quietly and sadly to Harvey's eager
+story, but before it was half through, he put an arm tenderly around
+the boy, and when it was finished, leaned over and kissed him.
+
+"Thank you, my son," he said. "I was feeling very sad over it all; I
+thought you were going to try to deceive your father by saying nothing
+to him about it."
+
+"Why, father!" said Harvey in great astonishment. "Did you know
+anything about it?"
+
+Then the father told "his" story, how one of the clerks from the
+office, passing down the south side of the square, a few minutes before
+mail time, saw a letter lying in the grass near Mr. Bailey's house,
+and picking it up, he recognized it as the one that was of great
+importance, so, without loss of time, hastened to post it.
+
+"And I saw him coming out of the post-office, just as I was walking
+back there the second time, when I couldn't find the letter!" exclaimed
+Harvey. "If I had only told him."
+
+Then, after a moment of silence, he added one more word that his father
+was glad to hear. "Father, I truly meant to tell you all about it, but
+I thought I would wait until morning, because it would make you feel so
+badly; but Emily said, tell you right away. And father, I won't stop
+for any old parrot after this."
+
+
+
+                            TWO SINGERS.
+
+ONE was Miss Cecilia Jamison. She sang in the opera house the evening
+that the Mozart Glee Club gave their closing concert for the season.
+She was called the best singer in the club. She wore a white silk dress
+with a very long train, very costly white lace around her neck, elegant
+new bracelets on her arms, and a necklace of pearls around her neck,
+with a tiny locket attached, set in diamonds.
+
+People said she looked "perfectly lovely," and her voice was just like
+an angel's; though as none of them ever heard an angel, I don't know
+how they told. "Some" people said that; there were others who thought
+her hair wasn't arranged becomingly, and that she didn't manage her
+train gracefully, and that there were a great many people who sang as
+well as she did.
+
+Besides, there was a good deal of confusion and trouble behind the
+curtain, just before Miss Cecilia sang; she laid down her sheet of
+music "exactly in that spot," just as people who lose things, are
+always sure they did, and when she went for it, it wasn't there.
+
+"'You' must have moved it," said Miss Cecilia to the leading alto, and
+her voice couldn't have sounded quite like an angel's, then.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"I!" said the leading alto, and her face grew red. "What should you
+think I want of 'your' music."
+
+"Well, 'somebody' has taken it, just to annoy me." declared Miss
+Cecilia, and she threw things about, and tipped over a bouquet of
+flowers that belonged to the leading alto, and spilled the water on the
+second soprano's white kid gloves, and did mischief generally.
+
+And when at last she moved forward to the stage, those left behind
+looked at each other and said, "Aren't you glad she is gone at last?
+Did you ever see anybody act so hateful?"
+
+Well, she sang, and these were some of the words:—
+
+   My love sits at the window, gazing, gazing, gazing,
+   My love sits at the window, gazing out into the night.
+
+What there was wonderful in that, or who she thought cared, I don't
+know; but she repeated it again and again; she yelled it, and moaned
+it, and whispered it, and wailed it, and told how dear her love was to
+her, and what she would do for him, and the names he called her, in a
+way that was perfectly senseless; no "love" worth having would have
+done any such thing.
+
+Then she stepped back and the audience showered bouquets on her, and
+clapped their hands so loud that she had to come back and sing another
+line of "My love sits at the window."
+
+And that was all. No, it "wasn't" all; for the people, going home,
+talked about her; some said they "could not see" why such a fuss was
+made over her voice, that it seemed to them she just "squealed;" and
+others said they were afraid she was growing very vain; that so much
+praise was had for young people. And even that was not all; the trouble
+is, there is never an end to anything. The song Miss Cecilia sang that
+night, the words she spoke in getting ready to sing, the words she
+spoke afterwards, the effect that the words, and the actions, and the
+song, had on other people,—all these went on doing their work, and
+though neither you nor I know the story, it growing, "growing," and
+Miss Cecelia will have to meet it again some day. That is the story of
+one singer: next month I will tell you about the other.
+
+                            ══════════
+
+
+
+[Illustration: AUTUMN LEAVES]
+
+
+
+                             HE WENT IN.
+
+                      BY REV. C. M. LIVINGSTON.
+
+TWO young men were "going in," as I passed along. They had been
+standing at the door a moment before in earnest conversation, as I
+could readily see from a distance, every little while one trying to
+pull the other in. But I just caught a good look of one and knew him.
+He was from the country, a member of a Sunday-school. He came to the
+city and become a clerk in one of our large stores. One of the other
+clerks soon got well acquainted with him. They often walked the streets
+together, after tea when their work was over. This other clerk knew all
+the low, wicked places of the city, especially where there was drinking
+and gambling.
+
+There was one particular saloon where he went every night, and spent
+his substance in riotous living.
+
+The keeper of this place allowed him many privileges, provided he would
+bring other clerks. So the young man was a daily visitor there, and it
+cost him but little to drink and play billiards and cards, if he only
+brought one or two others with him. Out of such the bar-keeper made his
+gains.
+
+Now this young man from the country, whom we will call Will, had never
+been in a saloon in his life, nor had he ever tasted intoxicating
+drink; and when he left home for the city, he had promised his mother
+to keep away from all such places, and be true to total abstinence.
+
+But he liked society and music and pictures, and he was very curious.
+He wanted to see what was to be seen, and so he loved to walk about
+the city and see the sights, though he meant never to go near any bad
+places; certainly never to enter them.
+
+This time of which I began to speak, Will's friend had led him about
+from shop window to picture gallery, and so on, till suddenly they
+stood before that saloon. It had a beautiful front, high, broad, and
+seemingly all glittering with gold. Hundreds of gas jets, within and
+without, made everything bright like midday. Handsome young men were
+going in and coming out, smiling, smoking, now and then, it is true,
+swearing and staggering. Sounds of sweet music ever and anon floated
+through the opening and closing door, and what seemed most gorgeous
+paintings could occasionally be seen.
+
+Thus Will stood with his friend, almost bewildered, as one in a new
+world. His friend had led him there for a purpose. He rightly guessed
+how he would be affected by all the sights and sounds near that saloon;
+though up to this time he had not told Will that he ever frequented
+such places.
+
+But Will, after a few minutes, began to remember his promise to his
+mother, and was about to turn and go away, when his companion plead for
+five minutes more of the music. Then he urged Will just to step in,
+just that once; that they needn't have anything to do with the wrong
+of it, but could simply see for themselves, and no doubt learn a great
+deal; and, what was best of all, prove to themselves that they could
+resist temptation, though right in the midst of it.
+
+He urged that the city missionary and many other gentlemen went in
+just to find out how things were inside, and be able to speak from
+experience. But Will had promised, and was about tearing himself away,
+when the door opened, and he caught a full view of the inside. It was
+gorgeous, dazzling. He had never seen anything so magnificent. Then the
+music, how could he get away from it? Why not listen a moment longer?
+
+So he listened, and it seemed as though angels must be playing. Was not
+music a good thing? Why not go in just once, and enjoy it near by, and
+see how they made it so sweet. Yet the promise came before him.
+
+"Mother, you needn't fear for me. I'll keep clear of all such things. I
+will for your sake at least."
+
+At that moment a fine looking gentleman came out and spoke very
+politely to Will's friend, and was introduced to Will. And they
+conversed about many things, while enrapturing music went on within,
+and again and again the paintings could be seen, all aglow with light.
+
+"Come," said the gentleman, "will not your friend step in a moment, and
+see the paintings, and enjoy the music better than one can out here?
+You will find most comfortable chairs, and the latest periodicals, and
+ice water (I see you are weary), all at your service. The proprietor
+is a friend of mine, and a perfect gentleman, too, if I do say it.
+Very few such as he in this city. He is highly respected. Several of
+the ministers know him. He used to be an active member of one of the
+largest Sabbath-schools here, and quite a supporter of the church,—does
+a great deal of good yet, gives great sums to several poor families
+whose fathers have got to drinking to excess. Strange that a man can't
+control himself. I know when to stop after I've taken a little to
+refresh myself. I despise a young man who has to sign a pledge to keep
+from being a sot.
+
+"Gentlemen who come in here are none of your low class. The proprietor
+won't have it. He is determined to prove that a young man may find a
+pleasant and profitable place to spend an evening with his friends,
+without falling into the beastly habit of common saloons. Come in a few
+minutes and rest yourselves, and then let's take a stroll somewhere
+else."
+
+So saying, he opened the frail door. Again that bewildering world
+within was seen. Poor, weak Will! He had stopped, just stopped and
+listened and looked in a moment. That was all. What possible harm could
+there be in that? Harm enough. He "was constrained" and "went in," and
+came out at midnight—"intoxicated," for the first time in his life.
+
+Three persons were once walking together one evening, and when they
+came near a certain house, two of them urged the third to go in with
+them. I do not know if there was one picture, or any kind of music, or
+any other such thing to attract him; but he went in. Think you they
+played cards or billiards together, or drank beer, or whiskey, or any
+strong drink, or used any low slang words, or told any disgusting
+stories, or took God's name in vain, or came out with red faces and
+blood-shot eyes, and staggered through the streets, carousing as they
+went?
+
+Yet they sat and dined together, and talked most warmly till their
+"hearts burned," yes, and they were all "intoxicated" when they
+separated that night—not like Will with maddening whiskey, but with
+"love," intoxicated with love to God, and everybody, and each other,—a
+love that caused one of those three to lay down his life—to die on the
+cross—to wash away with his own blood the sins even of drunkards and
+drunkard makers; a love that caused the other two to go here and there,
+telling the story of redeeming love.
+
+"He went in." Ah, yes one goes in, like Will; goes into some beautiful,
+fascinating—Hell, to lose his own soul; another goes in, like Jesus at
+Emmaus, into some plain cottage, or lost soul, to save that soul.
+
+What if you were to just "never enter" a saloon, no matter what may
+tempt you, but always be in the habit of going into God's house, or
+wherever the Lord will go with you, and like those two disciples eat of
+the bread which he may break and bless, and drink the water which he
+will give from the fountain of life.
+
+Well, what say you to that?
+
+He says: "Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my
+voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and sup with him, and
+he with me."
+
+I wonder if it will be said of you at the last day, "He went in;" I
+mean, into glory.
+
+                            ══════════
+
+
+
+        [JESUS, LOVER OF MY SOUL]
+
+   THOU, O Christ, art all I want;
+        More than all in thee I find:
+      Raise the fallen, cheer the faint,
+        Heal the sick, and lead the blind:
+
+[Illustration]
+
+   Just and holy is thy name,
+     I am all unrighteousness;
+   Vile and full of sin I am,
+   Thou art full of truth and grace.
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+                       A THANKSGIVING SHOWER.
+
+THE boys and girls of No. 42. talked about it all one day, during
+recess.
+
+"She's real sick," said one.
+
+"Who is?" asked another.
+
+"Why, Gertie; and she doesn't think she's ever going to be any better.
+She looks awful! I saw her yesterday: I peeked in at the window and
+talked to her. She is real lonesome in that ugly, dark room. They're
+awful poor!"
+
+"I know it!" said Alice Burns. "Her mother used to work in the factory,
+until she got rheumatism, and couldn't; and now her father is out of
+work, and they 'most starve, some days."
+
+"Where do they live?"
+
+"Why, in Lewis's basement,—a horrid, old, dark, ugly place! I've peeked
+through the window now and then, and talked to Gertie, and I never saw
+such an ugly, black hole of a room as it is. I should think she would
+die, lying there."
+
+The talk lasted for two or three days. The scholars could not forget
+Gertie; she had been one of the best readers in the class, and was a
+favorite. At last a bright idea came to one of them. I don't know which
+began it; they all chimed in so fast, that we could never find out
+which first said, "Let's give her a thanksgiving!"
+
+It was within a week of the annual Thanksgiving Day, and I presume the
+remark that one of the boys made, that "he" did not see what Gertie
+had to be thankful for, suggested it. You never saw anything like the
+way in which it grew! Every boy and girl in that school had something
+they were ready to give, to help Gertie be thankful. At first it was
+only flowers; but when one girl said she couldn't eat flowers, and was
+often hungry, and another said she couldn't sleep on them, and had an
+awful hard bed, and another said she couldn't wear them, and hadn't
+clothes enough to keep her warm, the flowers grew into sacks of flour,
+and bags of potatoes, and chickens, and comfortables, and blankets,
+and a woollen wrapper, and ever so many other things. Of course the
+mothers helped; mothers are almost always willing to help sweet, bright
+thoughts that their children have.
+
+Well, the next question was, how to get the gifts to her. Every boy and
+girl wanted to go and see her, and take his and her offering; but frail
+little Gertie was too weak for that; so they finally thought out the
+queerest plan. All the light, soft presents that could stand a bumping,
+and not make much noise, they resolved upon throwing down that basement
+window, one after another, as softly and quietly as it could be done!
+And the rest of the things? Oh, that is the nice part of the story! It
+was Celia Winters who said,—
+
+"After all, girls, what good will the nice things do her, if she has to
+live in that dark old basement?"
+
+"Yes, and if her father doesn't get some work to do?" chimed in Charlie
+Webster. He always agreed with Celia.
+
+After that, the two had their heads together, talking a good deal,
+and no one could find out what they were going to throw down at
+Gertie, until at last they owned that, besides flowers from their own
+greenhouses, they were not going to give her anything but two pieces of
+paper!
+
+But the papers! Celia's read that a cunning little house on Simmons
+street, with three rooms and a kitchen, had been rented for a year, and
+the Winters' carriage would be all ready to take her to her new home on
+Thanksgiving morning. (I forgot to say that it had been planned to give
+the shower the day before Thanksgiving, so that Gertie could have the
+whole of that day in which to be thankful.)
+
+Charlie's paper was for Gertie to give to her father; it contained an
+invitation from his father to be foreman of a machine shop, at good
+wages, which were to commence on Thanksgiving morning; and pasted in a
+corner of the paper, folded down and bearing Gertie's name, was a gold
+dollar of Charlie's own.
+
+What fun they had, those boys and girls! They talked it over
+afterwards, trying to decide whether they didn't have even a better
+time than Gertie. It was so nice to go softly to that basement window,
+one by one, and drop down a bundle right before Gertie's amazed eyes.
+At first they sent flowers, white ones, and they nearly spoiled the
+silence by a shout when they heard Gertie say,—
+
+"Why, mother, it snows, right in here!" And then in the next breath,
+"Oh, mother, it snows 'flowers!'"
+
+"Let it snow wool now!" said Rob Holden, and he popped down a great
+blanket at Gertie's feet.
+
+It took a long time, and was the funniest frolic the young people ever
+had. Of course, it would have been much easier to have sent the things
+all to the nice new house, the rent of which Celia's mother had paid,
+and which the seventy other mothers had furnished; but then it wouldn't
+have been near so funny.
+
+There is no use in my trying to tell you what Gertie and her mother
+said or did that afternoon. They were too astonished to do much besides
+look at one another and laugh; and as the great, soft, comfortable
+bundles kept dropping down, they looked at each other and cried. No, of
+course you can't see what there was to cry about; but if you had had
+such a hard time to get enough to eat and wear as this family had, you
+might have cried for joy.
+
+But what could they do or say when Celia's and Charlie's papers dropped
+down on them, and were read and understood? Dear little Gertie! Let me
+tell you what she said. She clasped her two thin hands together, and
+looked up, not at the basement window, but above it, and murmured, "I
+think we must all have died, and gone to heaven!"
+
+There ought to be a picture of that cunning little house into which
+they moved next day, to show you; everything that a neat little family
+of three could need, the seventy mothers—helped much by the seventy
+fathers—had put into it. Oh, I think you would like a picture of the
+handsome carriage and horses and coachman who came for Gertie on
+Thanksgiving morning, and took her to the little new house; or maybe
+a picture of the dray that followed her, piled high with the things
+that were showered down the window the night before; or maybe a picture
+of Gertie, in an easy-chair in front of the stove, in their bit of a
+dining-room, with a carpet on the floor, she with her feet on soft
+cushions, and soft cushions at her back, and a soft, bright shawl
+around her, eating a bit of Thanksgiving turkey.
+
+Ah, I know you would like a picture of all the scholars of Room 42 who
+set this ball a rolling; but there were over seventy of them, and how
+could I show you their photographs? You must just imagine it all.
+
+                            ══════════
+
+
+
+                          THE OTHER SINGER.
+
+NO bracelets, nor necklaces had she; no white silk dress had she ever
+seen, and a common white muslin, even, she had never worn; she was
+barefooted, and though the morning was warm, she had wrapped an old
+shawl around her to hide the holes in her dress. A neat little girl
+was Mandy, or at least she would have been, if she had known how; she
+always washed her feet in the fast-running gutter puddles, after a hard
+rain, just because she liked to see them look clean; but she had no
+needle and thread at home, nor patches; and her work among the barrels,
+picking for rags, was not the cleanest in the world.
+
+Yet on this afternoon, the very afternoon in which Miss Cecilia was
+getting ready for the concert, and frowning over her white silk,
+because the trail did not hang quite as she liked, did this little
+girl, Mandy give a concert. Her audience was an organ-grinder who
+stopped to rest a bit,—an old woman who was going by with a baby, and a
+little boy with a load of chips. The words she sang were:
+
+   "There is a fountain filled with blood,
+    Drawn from Immanuel's veins."
+
+And the chorus repeated as many times as did Miss Cecilia's. "I've been
+redeemed, I've been redeemed, I've been redeemed;" don't know "how"
+many times over; but what different words from Miss Cecilia's!
+
+"Where did you get that?" asked the organ-grinder.
+
+"What?" said Mandy, startled, and turning quickly.
+
+"'That;' that you're singing."
+
+"Oh, I got it to Sunday-school." And she rolled out the wonderful news,
+"I've been redeemed, I've been redeemed; been washed in the blood of
+the Lamb."
+
+"I don't s'pose you understand what you're singing about?" said the
+organ-grinder.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"Don't I, though," said Mandy, with an emphatic little nod of her head.
+"I know all about it, and it's all true. I belong to Him; he is going
+to make me clean inside, and dress me in white some day, to stay with
+him forever and ever. 'I've been redeemed, I've been redeemed,—been
+washed in the blood of the Lamb.'"
+
+Away down the street, as far as the organ-grinder could hear, as he
+trudged on, there came back to him the faint sound of that chorus,
+"I've been redeemed."
+
+Nobody threw bouquets to Mandy; nobody said she had a sweet voice.
+
+But the organ-grinder kept saying the words over and over to himself;
+they were not new words to him. Years ago, his old mother used to sing
+those first ones, "There is a fountain." He had never heard the chorus
+before, but he knew it fitted; he knew all about it; his mother had
+taught him; and away back, when he was a little boy, a minister had
+said to him once, "My boy, you must be sure to find the fountain and
+get washed."
+
+He never had. He was almost an old man; and it was years since he had
+thought about it; but Mandy's song brought it all back. Was that the
+end of it? Oh, no. The organ-grinder kept thinking, and thinking, and
+"thinking," until by-and-by, he resolved to do. He sought the fountain,
+and found it, and now, if he knew the tune, could sing, "I've been
+redeemed." Many a time he says the words over and over.
+
+Is "that" the end? Oh dear, no. It will never end.
+
+When Mandy and the organ-grinder stand up yonder, and she hears all
+about the song that she sung as she picked over rags, it will not, even
+then, be the end. Nothing ever ends.
+
+
+
+                                NAILS.
+
+                      BY REV. C. M. LIVINGSTON.
+
+THEY drove nails through his hands, those very hands that had been
+so tenderly laid upon the heads of little children and left them a
+blessing; those dear hands that broke the bread which he had made for
+the thousand hungry people; those gentle hands that touched and opened
+the blind man's eyes; hands that were always spread in blessing upon
+some one.
+
+Just think how much hard work those loving hands had done, and all
+for others. They never had been idle. They never had stolen one penny
+from any one; never had hurled a stone at any one, though bad people
+were often catching up stones to throw at him. They never had struck
+any one, though he was so tormented and insulted; and once shamefully
+struck in the face. Blessed, patient hands, yet there were people
+wicked enough to drive iron spikes through them.
+
+What if they had been your own mother's hands, after she had carried
+you about so long, and fed you when you could not feed yourself; had
+done for you what a mother only can do for a helpless child; and her
+hands were "so" weary, and she was trying to get a little rest; then,
+what if a band of rough soldiers had come and seized her and put
+hand-cuffs upon her, and led her away to prison, and condemned her to
+die, and driven nails through the same hands that had given them bread
+to eat when they came to her door almost starved to death! But they
+nailed Jesus to a tree, and let him hang there till he suffered, and
+groaned, and died. No one pitied him, and took him down, and bound up
+the wounds.
+
+They drove nails through his feet also. And what had those feet done to
+deserve such treatment? Had they carried him into a house to rob and
+kill? "The feet of the wicked are swift to shed innocent blood."
+
+Not long ago, a man walked right up behind his neighbor, and shot him
+dead, because he hated him. Think you the feet of Jesus ever carried
+him on such an errand? Think you he ever trod upon a worm if he could
+help it? Why, he was walking about day and night, over the rough
+country of Judea, hunting up the sick and those in trouble, to comfort
+them. Yet they nailed his weary feet to the tree just as they had
+nailed his hands.
+
+What if it had been said that Mary, who once bathed his feet with
+tears, and wiped them with her hair, and kissed them again and again;
+that this very Mary treated him like the others, striking him in the
+face and spitting upon him! Ah, you couldn't have believed it of her!
+She loved him too greatly for the wonderful love and mercy of Jesus
+to her. Ah, what great difference there was among the people in those
+times! Some loving the Redeemer so tenderly they were ready to die for
+him; while others could most cruelly put him to death on the cross.
+
+And did you never think what one thing makes some people so cruel,
+whether they have ever so handsome a face, or ever so much money,
+or high a place in the world? What makes some fathers so cruel to
+their families, sometimes swearing fiercely at the little children,
+or striking the sick mother; sometimes even killing them all, and
+themselves too? May be you would hardly believe it if I should tell you
+what happened only a little way from here, some months ago; but dear
+me, you have only to read the papers to find just such things going on
+daily.
+
+I hope you love the blessed Redeemer too tenderly ever to drive one
+painful nail into him. Know what I mean?
+
+                            ══════════
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+          THE SPARROW IN THE SNOW.
+
+   HE hopped down cheerily into the snow,
+     Brave little barefoot Brownie—
+   As if snow were the warmest thing below
+     And as cosy as it is downy!
+
+   And his brown, little, knowing, saucy head,
+     In a way that was cutely funny,
+   He jerked to one side, as though he said,
+     "'I' don't care if it 'isn't' sunny.
+
+   "I don't care! I don't care! I don't!" he said,
+     And he winked with his eye so cheery,
+   For somebody's left some crumbs of bread,
+     So my prospects are not all dreary.
+
+   "And what's a cold toe, when I've got a whole suit
+     Of the cunningest warm, brown feathers?
+   I don't care if I haven't a shoe to my foot;
+     I am the bird, sir, for all sorts of weathers.
+
+   "'I' don't fly away at the first touch of frost,
+     Like some of your fine-tongued birdies;
+   I 'don't' think everything's ruined and lost
+     When the wind mutters threatening wordies.
+
+   "I 'don't' care!" he chirped; "I don't care! I don't care!
+     It might be a great deal colder:
+   But I'm a fellow that knows no fear—
+     Old Winter but makes me bolder!"
+
+   Ah, plain, little, hardy, brown-coat bird!
+     Through life I'll try to remember
+   To meet its winters with cheerful word,
+     Like thee to brave my December.—_Youth's Companions._
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration: TOT HIMSELF]
+
+                  THE BOY WHO WANTED TO BE A HERO.
+
+A VERY small hero, you think, I suppose? Yes, and weak and pale, and
+with feet that would not carry even his little body but a very few
+steps at a time. Perhaps that was one reason why he was so fond of
+reading about brave, daring boys. When his mother came in from her
+kitchen, or her garden, or her dairy, to have a little talk with him,
+he nearly always had a story to tell her about a hero.
+
+"I've been reading about Robert Fulton," he said to her one day, his
+eyes shining. "Wasn't he splendid?"
+
+"Was he?"
+
+"Oh, yes, indeed! A queer boy, though, in school; he didn't like to
+study, and was real dull. Isn't that queer, mother, when he knew so
+much afterwards?"
+
+"Rather," said mother. "I think he must have learned, like other
+people, to do some things that he didn't like; for he certainly studied
+hard when he was a man."
+
+"Well, he didn't when he was a little fellow; and his teacher got real
+vexed at him one day, he was so dull, and gave him a knock on his hand
+with the ruler, saying he was determined to make him do something.
+
+"And Robert said, 'Look here, I came to school to have something beat
+into my brains, and not into my hands.' Wasn't that sharp?"
+
+"And saucy," said mother, laughing.
+
+"Well, it's real fun to read about him. He began to invent when he was
+a little bit of a boy. Once he made a lead pencil, and it was such a
+good one that all the boys liked it; so he made one for each.
+
+"But, O, mother, wouldn't you have liked to have seen that
+strange-looking little steamboat when it sailed up the Hudson? You
+see, nobody believed she would go! They laughed at Robert, and made
+fun of him, and said all sorts of sharp things about him. But one day
+in September a crowd came down to the wharf, and waited and watched. I
+can't help thinking, what if it hadn't moved when the right time came!
+I wonder what he would have done? Seems to me it would have killed me.
+But, you see, it did! O, then how they shouted! 'He' wasn't afraid; he
+knew it would go. Why, when he was only fourteen years old, he invented
+a way of paddling a boat instead of rowing it.
+
+"He could do ever so many things. Did you know he was an artist? This
+book says his pictures were splendid, and he earned money by selling
+them,—lots of money. When he was only twenty-one, he had earned enough
+to buy a farm, and he bought it and gave it to his mother!
+
+"I'll tell you another thing he did. Once there came a man to New York
+with a wonderful machine that he said would go of itself,—perpetual
+motion, you know, mother. Everybody who went to see it had to pay a
+dollar,—and hundreds and thousands went. For a long time Robert Fulton
+wouldn't go, though people coaxed him to; he said it was a humbug. At
+last he went, and he hadn't been standing by the strange machine but a
+few minutes when he said,—
+
+"'Why this is a crank motion; somebody is turning a crank to make this
+machine go, and you are an impostor.'
+
+"Then the man was angry; but all the people joined in, and begged
+Robert Fulton to find out about it, and the man didn't know how to
+refuse to let him examine it; so he knocked off a few pieces of lath,
+and found a string around a wheel, and that went back to another part
+of the machine that was all shut up, and inside of it was an old man
+turning a crank! Oh, mother, he was a genius and a hero! He was brave,
+and wise, and did so many grand things! Mother, if your poor little boy
+could do one 'little' thing to show that he was brave, wouldn't it be
+nice?"
+
+"Very," said mother, with cheerful voice, pretending not to see the
+tears in her sick little boy's eyes. "I like heroes very much; I should
+like one fur a son. I was thinking about it last night. Suppose you
+make up your mind to be one?"
+
+The little lame boy rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand, and
+looked eagerly at his mother. She never made sport of him, therefore
+she meant something. What was it?
+
+"Do you see a way for me to be one?" he asked her, and he was so much
+in earnest that his voice trembled with excitement.
+
+"Yes, indeed I do; I read about a way last night, and I thought it was
+so good that I copied it for you. The wisest man who ever lived gave
+this receipt." And mother took from her pocket a bit of paper on which
+was written these words:
+
+   "He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth
+his spirit than he that taketh a city."
+
+                            ══════════
+
+
+
+                   RUFUS MAKES A POCKET MEASURE.
+
+"NOW what is it all for? That is what 'I' should like to know. Here you
+have been working over that wonderful box every evening for a week. I
+believe you are a miser, and that box is to hoard up your treasures in."
+
+Pretty Eva Trumbull fixed her roguish eyes on Rufus, the farmer boy,
+and waited to see what he would say.
+
+They were very unlike,—those two. Eva was a city-bred young miss of
+thirteen. She had never been in the country before in her life, and
+here she was at her farmer uncle's, to spend the whole summer. She
+liked it all; everything was "great fun." One of the things which she
+like the best, was to dance around Rufus, the good, faithful boy, who
+worked for wages in the summer, and for his board and schooling in the
+winter, and whom everybody liked, because he was honest and earnest and
+faithful. And Eva liked to tease him, or to try to; he had too much
+good sense to be easily teased.
+
+It was as she said. For several evenings he had been at work over
+a mysterious box. It was made of black walnut, carefully polished,
+and had ten compartments in it, divided by neat-fitting, thin
+highly-polished boards. It amused Eva very much to see how particular
+he was about the fit of each little board.
+
+"Just tell me what it is for, before you go any farther; I'm almost
+dying of curiosity."
+
+"If I were going to die of my own free will, I'd try to do it in a
+better cause," Rufus said, gravely. He was not so fashionable as Eva,
+and he did not understand many of the rules of etiquette, but his
+mother had brought him up not to use slang expressions which meant
+nothing.
+
+"Why, I just as soon tell you about this box," he said, after a minute.
+"You'll laugh, of course; but I don't suppose that will hurt me."
+
+"I won't laugh a bit, unless it is something funny."
+
+"Well, it's a money box."
+
+"A money box! I told you, you were going to be a miser."
+
+"Well, I'm not," said Rufus, laughing. "I'm planning to spend it, not
+to keep it; but I like to be sort of systematic about things. You see,
+I know just about what I'm worth, now-a-days. There's about six months
+in the year that I am earning money; and, take it off and on, in one
+way and another I earn about sixty dollars, besides my hoard. Now it
+happens that there are ten things for which I need to spend that money,
+and as nearly as I can calculate, it might be equally divided between
+them. So thinking it all over, I concluded that the systematic way
+would be to have a box with ten compartments, all labelled, you know,
+and drop the money in a dollar at a time maybe, or ten cents at a time,
+just as I happen to be paid."
+
+"That's a real nice idea," said Eva, admiringly; "but I can't imagine
+how you can have ten different things, for which you need to spend
+money regularly. Now I have a hundred different ways of spending money,
+but hardly any of them are regular." Here she gave one of her merriest
+laughs.
+
+"Oh, well, it is different with me," explained Rufus. "You see, I don't
+know much about spending money for things I might happen to like to
+buy. I have to spend mine for the things that 'must' be bought anyhow;
+and so it's easier to calculate."
+
+"Still," persisted Eva, "I don't know how you make ten."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"Well, I'll tell you." There was a little flush on Rufus's face, but
+Eva looked so sober, and so interested, that he determined to trust
+her. "In the first place, there's mother; I shall paint her name on
+this first department, and one-tenth of everything I ever earn is to
+pop in there. Then there's clothes for me, they will take another
+tenth."
+
+"A tenth for clothes! That will be only six dollars a year, Rufus
+Briggs! Do you mean to dress in birch bark, that you think you can make
+six dollars a year do it?"
+
+"Well," said Rufus, in a determined tone, "when a fellow 'has' to, you
+know, why he 'has' to; besides, that's only for general clothes, I've
+got a department here for boots and shoes, and another for shirts, and
+if I have to borrow from one of those departments for the other, why it
+will do no harm."
+
+But still Eva laughed; she knew that six, or twelve, or eighteen
+dollars in a year were of no account so far as clothes were concerned.
+Didn't 'she' wear clothes? She knew what they cost.
+
+"They can't cost more than you've got to buy them with," Rufus said,
+firmly, and went on with his plan. "There are Mamie and Fannie, my two
+little sisters, I've given them each a department; of course mother
+will spend the money for them, but I kind of like to put it in their
+own names. Then here's the corner for books, I need school books, and
+paper, and pens, and all such things you know, but they must all come
+out of this general fund.
+
+"Then here's the housekeeping; I have a corner for that, because mother
+must be helped, you know; that place where her name is, means for her
+own private use, and here's the rent corner; mother has hard times
+bringing that in every month; now you see, I've got nine, and I haven't
+looked out for sickness at all; that troubled me at first, but then
+I concluded that if any of us were sick, we shouldn't need so many
+clothes, nor books, and that it would even itself out; so here's my
+last corner."
+
+And very carefully Rufus printed the word, "BENEVOLENCE" over this
+compartment.
+
+"Be—nev—o—lence," spelled out Eva, and now she was too much astonished
+to laugh. "Why Rufus Briggs! Just as though you could afford to give
+six dollars a year to benevolence!"
+
+"Why it's only a tenth," said Rufus stoutly; "and it's got to be
+divided up more than any of the others, there are so many things to
+give for."
+
+"The idea!" said Eva.
+
+Just then her aunt called her, and she went away thinking about the
+wonderful box with its many compartments, and only sixty dollars to put
+into them all.
+
+"And six of them to give away!" she said again, and she thought of the
+dollar and a half a week that her father gave her for "pin money" out
+of which she had never given a cent for benevolence in her life. This
+story is true, and it grew; some day I'll tell you the rest of it.
+
+                            ══════════
+
+
+
+                     TWO WAYS OF LOOKING AT IT.
+
+OF all the teachers in the great school, I think the children thought
+the most of Miss Carley. She was "so sweet!" they said and "so nice!"
+and "so good!" and all the other words that young people like to use,
+with "so" before them.
+
+It was when the flowers were getting scarce, that some wise brain
+whose father kept a conservatory, proposed that they make Miss Carley
+a floral offering on the very next morning. "Let's every single one of
+us bring a bouquet in a vase," said the eager little planner, "and set
+them on her table, and in the windows, and all around the platform. It
+is her birthday, you know, and she loves flowers 'so' much! Won't the
+room look too lovely for anything?"
+
+Every child of the seventy-five was delighted, except Trudie Briggs.
+She went home, sober not to say cross.
+
+"Won't it be pretty?" said little Kate, hopping along by her side.
+"What flowers are you going to take, Trudie?"
+
+"Cabbages," said Trudie crossly; and her mouth being thus snappishly
+opened, she talked on. "It is just a plan of Susie Martin's, so that
+she can show off her father's greenhouse flowers, and her mother's
+beautiful vases! 'I' shan't take a single thing. What have we got to
+take? Not even a sweet pea, nor nothing; nothing but weeds, and an
+old cracked tumbler to put them in. They may just bring their grand
+flowers. I won't have nothing to do with it."
+
+Trudie studied grammar, but when very much excited, she forgot to use
+it.
+
+Poor little Kate looked sorrowful; she loved Miss Carley, and wanted to
+take her some flowers.
+
+The next morning, when she went to call her father to breakfast, she
+saw the south field, all a-bloom with red clover. She thought it
+looked lovely; and then and there her resolve was taken. Not a word
+said she to Trudie, feeling sure that nine-year-old sister would call
+the red blossoms "nothing but weeds." She slipped out just at school
+time, and gathered a bunch of the freshest and sweetest, and using her
+chubby-brown hand for a vase, started in breathless haste for school.
+
+Trudie, being still cross, had waited for her about two minutes, then
+gone on ahead.
+
+It was just a trifle late when little Kate reached the door, the
+children were all seated, and Miss Carley's hand was on the bell. How
+lovely the schoolroom looked! Everywhere that a vase could be made to
+stand there was one, holding the brightest of fall flowers. In the
+centre of the table was a wonderful wreath of fine, sweet blossoms,
+which Miss Carley had promised to wear at recess.
+
+She looked very happy; every child in the room except Trudie had
+remembered her with flowers, and it pleased her. She turned a smiling
+face on little Kate, as she came down the aisle, and waited for her,
+and bent down to receive the red clovers from the chubby, brown hand,
+while Trudie's face was redder than the clovers. She was actually
+ashamed of her little sister!
+
+What would Miss Carley say to a bunch of weeds from that hot brown hand!
+
+What she said, was, "You dear child! How sweet they are."
+
+Then she stooped down, and kissed the sweet face of the little giver,
+and placed every clover carefully in her belt, where she could "smell
+them all the time," she said brightly. And there did little Kate's
+gift stay all day, "They were the only flowers she wore," said Susie
+Martin. "The little darling! Wasn't it sweet of her?" And Susie meant
+the middle of the sentence for little Kate, and the last part for Miss
+Carley.
+
+                            ══════════
+
+
+
+                            THEIR FAITH.
+
+"FATHER looks so sad," said Hattie to her older sister Bertha. "I
+wonder what makes him look so downcast. Is he sick, Bertie, do you
+think, or has he heard some bad news, or is it that same old headache?
+I couldn't 'think' of sleeping last night. After kissing him, and
+looking back, I thought I saw a great tear in his eye, though he
+quickly brushed it away and tried to appear cheery. But all night long
+I kept seeing that tear, and wondering if you and I couldn't in some
+way keep dear, sad papa, from suffering so. O, what can be the matter?
+What can we do?"
+
+"Pray," was the calm, assured answer of the sister. "'Ask what ye
+will,' said the last Sunday lesson. His promises are all yea and amen.
+They are as true as—as—the sun, dear Hattie. Don't you know it? I am
+sure He'll never let one of them fail."
+
+Side by side, with clasped hands, they knelt, and silently, but
+earnestly, they asked, "O, Heavenly Father, 'do,'—O, DO bless our own
+sad father. Help him out of all his trouble. Show us what we can do to
+help him and cheer him. For Jesus' sake, Amen."
+
+So they prayed, not once only, as too many do, and forget all about it.
+They prayed "without ceasing." Their sympathy for their father was so
+great that they thought of little else except how they might help him
+and comfort him. They lost all wish for dress and gay society. Their
+pastor and Sunday-school teacher observed that something was greatly
+troubling them; but though they tried to learn the cause of their
+sad countenances, the sisters kept the matter locked up in their own
+breasts.
+
+Meanwhile, however, they were coming nearer to Jesus. It was not long
+after Hattie noticed that "tear," that both had become converted, and
+became very earnest Christians.
+
+"I am almost discouraged, Hattie," said her sister, one day, as she
+still noticed her father's sad look. "I'm afraid He isn't going to do
+what we want him to. You know it is just three weeks to-day since we
+agreed together to ask our Heavenly Father to help. But where's the
+help? O, I'm almost in despair." And Bertha could keep back the tears
+no longer.
+
+"But I'm not discouraged yet," said Hattie. "Will not God 'avenge his
+own elect, which cry day and night unto Him, though he bear long?' He
+will, he will, and it won't be long either. Don't cry, Bertie; maybe,
+before the week is done he will answer."
+
+He did. Very soon that sad-faced father began to smile and rejoice, not
+simply because he got into good business, and was greatly prospered,
+and all this through the prayers of faith and loving help of those two
+dear daughters, but because he gave his own heart to God, and was now a
+very happy Christian.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+                      HOW SIDNEY GOT THE PLACE.
+
+HE stood on the shore and looked down longingly at the smooth sheet of
+ice. How it sparkled and glowed in the morning sunshine! He could skim
+across like a bird; he had his skates strung over his shoulder. What
+hindered him from crossing the ice? Why, just as he reached the front
+gate, his mother had put her head out of the window and called:
+
+"Sidney?"
+
+"Yes 'm."
+
+"You won't go on the ice, will you?"
+
+Then he had stopped, and looked back at her appealingly.
+
+"Why, mother, the ice is strong enough to bear a four-horse team, and
+it cuts off a good mile of walk."
+
+"Can't help it, my son. You won't cross it, will you?"
+
+"No 'm," he had said, sadly.
+
+But the window closed instantly, and his mother went about her work
+with a quiet face. She knew that when Sidney said no, he meant it.
+
+So the boy, though he looked at the ice, had not the least idea of
+trying it: he merely told it that he wished he had left his skates at
+home, instead of lugging them along; and he didn't see why he hadn't.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+A dozen or more boys appeared presently from different directions.
+
+"Going across?" asked Sidney.
+
+And half a dozen voices answered that they just were. The skating was
+prime. The most of them had school books.
+
+"Come on," they said to Sidney.
+
+But he shook his head. "Can't."
+
+"Aren't you going across the lake?"
+
+"No, I'm going 'around' the lake. Mother didn't want me to cross on the
+ice."
+
+"Ho! Ho!" "Ha! Ha!" "He! He!" These were only a few of the answers.
+"Why man, the ice is two feet thick!"
+
+"I didn't say it wasn't," he answered good-humoredly. "I only said
+mother didn't want me to go on it. Good morning!"
+
+Off he went, amid shouts and laughter. You know what ill-bred boys
+shout at each other at such times:
+
+"Tied to his mother's apron-string!" "Coward!" "Baby!" and all those
+things.
+
+He whistled, to drown their voices, and tramped on.
+
+He was not going to school. The fact was, he hoped to get a place as
+office boy that morning. He was on his way to see about it. If he
+could only have crossed the lake, it would have saved so much time! He
+quickened his steps into almost a run as he thought of it, and arrived,
+somewhat out of breath, at the place advertised, to see two of the
+boys who had shouted after him at the lake, sitting comfortably in two
+office chairs, chatting.
+
+"You here!" he said in dismay; and wondered how many more wanted the
+place.
+
+Yes, they assured him they were there; and they didn't cut through into
+the lake, either. They hoped he had a nice walk this cold morning. But
+there wasn't much fun in teasing Sidney; he was so good-natured.
+
+"I should have liked to skate across," he said, swinging, his skates to
+the floor, "but mother worries about it, and she asked me not to go on
+the ice this morning. So of course I didn't."
+
+[Illustration: ON THE LAKE.]
+
+"Of course I would!" said the larger boy. "My mother is just such a
+moolly. She tried to make me keep off, but I told her 'No sir!' Catch
+me going around, with the thermometer below zero."
+
+"It's queer what ails the mothers," said the third boy, laughing.
+"There's three of them it seems, only mine is my grandmother. 'Now,
+Tommy dear, 'don't' skate across,' she said." And he mimicked the
+feeble voice.
+
+"What did you say?" inquired his giggling friend.
+
+"Oh, I said—
+
+"'Of course not, grandma. I wouldn't "think" of such a thing.'
+
+"I meant, you know, that I wouldn't think of such a thing as walking
+around."
+
+Then there was more laughing. Presently they began to talk about their
+chances for the place, in the midst of which the door to the inner
+office opened, and the man who wanted a boy called one of them to him.
+
+The other boys waited until in turn each had been to talk with the
+lawyer. He took their names and ages, and asked for specimens of
+their handwriting, and gave them a chance to show how rapidly and
+correctly they could add a column of figures, then he left them all to
+themselves, and they discussed their hopes.
+
+[Illustration: "I WANT A BOY WHO CAN OBEY HIS MOTHER," SAID THE LAWYER.]
+
+At last the door opened again, and the gentleman said:
+
+"Sidney Martin, I have decided that you are the boy I want. If the
+terms suit, you may consider yourself engaged. It is only fair to
+explain to these others what decided me. Thomas is a trifle more rapid
+at figures than you, and Henry's writing is rather better; but, the
+truth is, you all talked pretty loud while you were alone here, and
+that partition is thin. I want a boy who can obey is mother, even when
+he thinks her rules are unnecessary. And I want one who is neither
+disrespectful nor deceitful, which, by your own stories, you two were
+this morning. Remember, my lads, that a boy who respects his mother, is
+very apt to be trustworthy."
+
+                            ————————————
+
+
+
+                       THE LITTLE YELLOW DOG.
+
+                     BY MRS. C. M. LIVINGSTON.
+
+MAMIE was a dear little bit of a girl, pretty and bright and loving,
+with such a sunshiny face that it cured the blues just to look at her.
+
+She had a great many names. She would answer to "Dantie," "Pussy,"
+"Sunshine" and "Polly," quite as well as to Mamie. "Polly" was
+grandpa's name for her.
+
+[Illustration: MR. JYRICKS' LITTLE DOG.]
+
+Polly had one fault; that does not mean that she had but one, but that
+this one was so very great it was noticed more than all the others.
+
+The fault was this: she was never quite ready to do anything the very
+minute she was asked to; she always had something of her own to attend
+to first.
+
+If papa said, "Dantie, please get my slippers," he was sure to hear
+"Yes, in just a minute, papa; Dollie is most asleep." When grandpa
+said, "Come, little Polly, can't you run up-stairs and get my glasses?"
+She was sure to take just three more turns round the room—if she
+happened to be playing with kitty—before she started. Or if she were
+reading a story and was asked to do an errand, she would get slowly
+up, and creep along with her eyes on the book, stop at the foot of the
+stairs and read, and then call out, "Mamma, did you say you wanted a
+spool of white or black thread?"
+
+It was very trying indeed, and grandpa said the ugly weed ought to be
+rooted out before it grew any bigger. Sometimes he tried to make her
+ashamed of it. When she was gone for a long time for the newspaper that
+he sent her for, she would find grandpa busily writing when she came
+with it, and he would take no notice of her until she said, "Here is
+your paper, grandpa."
+
+"My paper!" he would say then, looking over his glasses at her. "Sure
+enough, I did send for a paper some minutes ago, didn't I? But the time
+has gone by now, I have turned my attention to other subjects; no paper
+for me, Miss Polly, thank you."
+
+Then Mamie would hang her head and blush; but by the next time grandpa
+asked her to do an errand for him, she had forgotten all about it.
+
+One day grandpa called Mamie to take a walk with him. She ran for her
+hat and sack, for she was always glad of the chance to go with him.
+They always had nice times together; he explained everything to her
+that she did not know about, and let her chatter off long stories. And
+if they came along to any shop or place where anything curious was
+going on, grandpa took her right in.
+
+[Illustration: "MAY I PICK THEM?"]
+
+"Where are we going to-day, grandpa?" said Mamie, holding fast to his
+hand, and giving a happy little hop.
+
+"Going to see a dog," said grandpa, "that can do what a girl can't."
+
+Mamie, of course, was eager to know what a dog "could" do that a girl
+could not, and she asked a great many questions; but grandpa stopped
+them all by beginning to tell a long story about the St. Bernard dogs
+that save a great any people from freezing. The story lasted until they
+got to the shop where grandpa had his boots mended.
+
+[Illustration: DOGS OF ST. BERNARD.]
+
+The shoemaker was a little old man, and he had a nice little shop, and
+a good little old wife, and a funny little yellow dog.
+
+Very soon grandpa said: "Mr. Jyricks, I want my little girl to see what
+wonderful things your dog can do."
+
+Then the little man twinkled a smile from his mouth and eyes, and
+called:
+
+"Here, Jip, you!"
+
+And then the little dog in the net room came scampering into that room
+so fast that he almost went heels over head, and seated himself in a
+little yellow ball at his master's feet, his bright eyes turned to his,
+as much as to say: "Now sir, what will you have?"
+
+"Jip, shut that door!" said Mr. Jyricks.
+
+And at the door Jip flew, and with his two fore paws pushed and pushed
+with all his might, until it shut.
+
+"Now, Jip, bring my slippers," his master said.
+
+And Jip scampered into the other room and out again as quick as a
+wink with a slipper in his mouth, laid it down, and then ran back and
+brought the other one. And so he brought his master's glasses and the
+newspaper without waiting an instant after he was told.
+
+Mamie laughed until she almost cried to seethe funny little fellow
+perform. She was so taken up with his tricks, seeing him stand on his
+hind feet and offer one of his fore paws, when she said: "How do you
+do, Jip?" that she forgot all about asking her grandfather what he
+meant by saying Jip could do what a girl couldn't, until they were
+almost home.
+
+Then grandpa said, "I'll tell you when we have our talk to-night."
+
+"Now, grandpa," Mamie said as she nestled into her grandfather's arms
+after tea, when he and she were all alone in his room, "now tell me
+what the little dog could do that I can't. I'm sure I can shut doors,
+and bring your slippers, and newspapers, and glasses."
+
+"Polly," said grandpa, taking her round face between his hands and
+looking into her eyes, "the little dog can do it 'right away' the
+minute he is spoken to. O, Polly, Polly! To think a poor little yellow
+dog can do what you cannot."
+
+[Illustration: ONE OF JIP'S TRICKS.]
+
+The little head went down then on grandpa's bosom, and neither of them
+spoke for a few minutes, then grandpa said:
+
+"Polly, I suppose I can buy that little dog to wait upon me, then you
+need not take the time from your kitty and dolly to run errands for an
+old grandpa."
+
+"Grandpa," said poor little Polly, sitting up and wiping off the tears,
+with her handkerchief done into a hard ball, and struggling with her
+sobs, "I—I—shall just DIE if you do; it—it 'll break my heart right in
+two. Just try me once more, grandpa! I truly will do every single thing
+the very minute you tell me. I do want to stop being so naughty. I will
+remember, sure as I live and breathe."
+
+Then the gray head and the golden head went together, and there was a
+great hugging time, and grandpa took the sorrowful little bundle to his
+bosom, and said: "There, there, little one, don't cry anymore. Grandpa
+'ll help you remember, won't he?"
+
+"Yes;" said Mamie, sitting up straight. "You'll say 'little yellow dog'
+to me every time you see me going to forget, won't you?"
+
+Then grandpa laughed loud and long, and he hugged his pet again, and
+took off his glasses and wiped away tears, or something, from them.
+
+                            ————————————
+
+
+
+                   WHERE I WENT, AND WHAT I SAW.
+
+DEAR PANSIES: Wherever I go, and whatever pleasant sight I see, I find
+myself saying: I will tell the Pansies about that. But someway I never
+seem to get to it. Now I have resolved that whatever of interest I find
+as I go through the world, you shall share. Therefore I shall begin
+with this year a series of papers with the above heading. Let me tell
+you first about Long Branch.
+
+"Where 'is' the branch?" said a little bit of a boy, leaning out of
+the carriage and looking about him eagerly. "I don't see anything of a
+'branch.'"
+
+We found, on questioning him, that he had expected to see a long
+gnarled branch of some grand old tree, with perhaps a nest or two built
+in it, and a few birds keeping house. To find that it was simply a
+town, with one long and rather narrow street, built up with hotels and
+cottages on one side, and with old ocean rolling and tumbling along the
+other side, was a disappointment to the little boy.
+
+Oh, but the street is lovely! On a summer afternoon, with a bright
+blue sky overhead, and a brisk sea-breeze rolling in, to be seated in
+an easy carriage behind two handsome horses, and be wheeled along over
+the hard road, watching the surf break on the shore by your side, is
+about as pleasant a thing as one can have in this world. Where is Long
+Branch? Only about two hours' ride, by rail, from that great bustling
+dirty city—New York. The cottages I cannot attempt to describe; no two
+are in the least alike. Most of them, however, are painted very dark,
+with bright red trimmings; the lawns leading to the doors are kept
+beautifully green and smooth shaven.
+
+The afternoon in which I last rode through Long Branch was simply
+perfect: cool and bright; sky and sea were all in their glory, and
+nothing smoother or cleaner than the road over which we rolled, can
+be imagined. There is a wonderful public garden, which we visited. I
+have forgotten the owner's name, but we enjoyed the tens of thousands
+of dollars that he had spread out for our benefit, quite as much as
+"he" could have done. There we saw plants and flowers in every possible
+variety; names spelled with flowers, mottoes in flowers, lawns covering
+acres of ground bordered with flowers.
+
+"Oh!" we said; and "Oh!" and "Oh!" was re-echoed in the carriage from
+every side. That was all we could think of to say; and I find, in
+trying to describe it, "Oh!" is the only word at command.
+
+But there was one object of special interest to us all. Flowers might
+grow and wave, the ocean might roll in all its grandeur, beautiful
+houses by the dozens might invite attention, we gave only passing
+thought to them all, and looked at, and talked about, and thought of
+one plain cottage, on the roof of which waved our country's flag, and
+around which stood a guard of soldiers. Oh, you know who lay in one
+of the rooms under that cottage roof, about whom all the world was
+thinking that day.
+
+"What is the news!" we said, leaning forward and speaking to a man, a
+stranger.
+
+How did he know what we meant? There may have been news of great
+importance somewhere else in the world.
+
+But he shook his head, and said: "No news since twelve o'clock."
+
+And we knew just what he meant.
+
+A little further on we met a little girl, and she was crying.
+
+We stopped again and said: "What news?"
+
+How did we know but she was crying about a lost kitten, or because her
+mother would not let her go to the beach, or the lake?
+
+[Illustration: FRANKLYN COTTAGE, LONG BRANCH, WHERE PRESIDENT GARFIELD
+DIED.]
+
+No; she shook her head, and said: "We are afraid he is worse!" And she
+cried harder.
+
+We knew what she meant. It was Saturday afternoon, and the President of
+the United States lay dying in that cottage close at hand! We stopped
+our horses just before the lawn leading to the door. We looked at the
+narrow railroad track which had sprung up in the night to carry him to
+what we had hoped would be the life-giving sea, and we wondered if the
+car would soon roll over this same track to take away only his body!
+
+[Illustration: "A GOOD MAN."]
+
+The gentlemen in our carriage lifted their hats as they stood opposite
+the cottage where the President lay. For a few minutes none of us spoke.
+
+Then Dr. Nelson of Geneva, New York, said slowly: "A good man."
+
+I thought about it all the way home. President though he was, with all
+true men and women watching in such anxious sorrow for news of him, the
+utmost that could be said of him, or of any human being, was covered up
+in that one word—"good."
+
+Less than thirty-six hours from that time, the bells tolled out sadly
+and solemnly, and when we looked out of our windows in the gray dawn of
+the morning, all the flags were at half-mast. The "good man" was gone.
+You know all about it, dear Pansies, how the Nation mourned for its
+dead President.
+
+Let me tell you of two verses which that same dear Dr. Nelson wrote
+to us from his distant home. No, I will tell you where they are to be
+found, and you may read them for yourselves. Psalms 46:1, 2. Meantime,
+boys, have you begun such lives, that, when you are men, those speaking
+of you can say: "A good man?"
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration: A HAPPY NEW YEAR.]
+
+
+
+                      STORIES FOR BOYS AND GIRLS
+
+                           HAPPY NEW YEAR!
+
+IS it possible! What has become of 1881? Whoever knew a year to fly
+away so fast before? Well, we start out together for 1882. We have many
+new friends, and new plans and hopes.
+
+We hope to have all your names enrolled as members of the "PANSY
+SOCIETY" (for particulars look in another column). We hope to have many
+letters from you during the year.
+
+In the column entitled "Where I Went and What I Saw," we mean to tell
+you about a good many places and people which we think will please you.
+In the story entitled "Side by Side," we expect you to become specially
+interested, for it is a very important story. As for "Reuben Stone,"
+the "Man of the House," I have had so many letters from you during the
+year, expressing pleasure in the story, that I know you will like to
+follow my boy's fortunes through another year.
+
+For the rest, I will not make any promises, only this: If the "PANSY"
+is not a much better paper during the year 1882, I shall be very much
+astonished, and sadly disappointed.
+
+Now I hope that every true Pansy will set to work for his and her
+paper. How many boys and girls do you know who do not take it? How many
+have you asked to do so? How many will you ask again? How many prizes
+for new subscribers do you intend to earn?
+
+How I am pouring out the questions on you! Never mind, you are capable
+of answering them all.
+
+Just one more, the most important of all. Bend your ear and let me
+whisper it: Do you begin this New Year with Jesus? Please write to me
+and answer that question. Yours lovingly,           PANSY.
+
+                            ————————————
+
+
+                WHO DID IT?—A STORY IN TWO CHAPTERS.
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+HESTER opened her eyes in the gray dawn of the New Year's morning, and
+gave a little chuckle of delight.
+
+There was nothing very cheering about her. The attic in which she slept
+was decent, it is true, in fact, was comfortable; but it was dark and
+rather cold, and there was just as little furniture as one could get
+along with. Yet Hester hugged the big red and brown comfortable, and
+lay still a few minutes to enjoy her thoughts. There was no bright
+stocking hung up for her as she knew there was down-stairs for the
+children of the family. She did not expect a single present of any
+sort; in fact, she never had New Year's presents, or presents of any
+kind. But oh, how happy she was!
+
+She had never been to a party in her life, and to-day she was going.
+Mrs. Neilson, her Sabbath-school teacher, had made a New Year's party
+for her class. A great many whispers had buzzed through the class last
+Sunday about the wonders that would be seen in her beautiful home; and
+Hester's hopes and expectations ran high. Besides, she had a brand new
+dress to wear. To be sure it was only a bright calico of pretty figure
+and neat make. But Hester was not used to anything better, and she
+thought the new calico with a lace ruffle in the neck was beautiful.
+So with her heart all full of happiness, she presently hopped out of
+her warm nest and began to dress. It was less than two hours afterwards
+that Hester's morning clouded.
+
+"Hester!" came in an unusually loud sharp voice from Mrs. Denton's
+room. Mrs. Denton was the woman with whom Hester lived; a pretty good
+woman generally. Hester dropped the cloth she was polishing the knives
+with and ran in haste; the tone was so unusually sharp.
+
+Loud, excited voices sounded down to her from the room above, as she
+ran up the stairs. Miss Cora was there, and Miss Emeline, and she could
+hear Miss Cora's voice saying: "Of course she did it, mother, who else
+would?"
+
+Then Hester knocked timidly at the door.
+
+"Hester, look here!"
+
+Mrs. Denton's voice was positively awful. No wonder. She held, thrown
+over her arm, Miss Cora's blue silk dress which always reminded Hester
+of the sky in a winter day, or the sea getting ready for a storm.
+Across the front breadth were great bright drops of blood. At least,
+that was what they looked like to the horrified Hester. After awhile
+she discovered that they were blotches of red ink: enough of them to
+ruin the dress.
+
+"Now," said Mrs. Denton, still in that awful voice, "suppose you give
+us an account of this business!"
+
+[Illustration: "WHO DID IT?"]
+
+She give an account of that business! What did she know about it? How
+could they think that she knew anything about those wonderful blue silk
+waves?
+
+"Me, ma'am?" she said, catching up the hem of her work-apron and
+rolling it around her finger as she always did when she was startled,
+her face growing red and white by turns.
+
+"Yes, you! How came you to put those ink-stains on this dress? What
+could have been your object, you wicked child? After all that we have
+done for you, too. I cannot think it possible that it was an accident,
+for you have no business near the dress. The least you can do is to
+give an account of yourself."
+
+"Why, ma'am," said Hester, her cheeks ablaze now, "why ma'am, how can
+you think—I don't know—I never touched or saw—"
+
+"Mamma," said Cora, "how can you stand there and hear her tell stories?
+The deceitful, spiteful little thing! My best dress utterly ruined, and
+I have nothing fit to wear to-day." And the young lady crumpled herself
+into a heap on the foot of her mother's bed and sobbed aloud.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"Hester," said Mrs. Denton, "there is no use in your trying to deceive
+us in this way. It would be a great deal better for you to confess
+your sin and explain what object you could have had. I am perfectly
+astonished. I knew you were a high-tempered little girl, but I couldn't
+have believed you guilty of such wickedness. When did you do it?"
+
+"I never did! I never did!" almost screamed poor Hester, and her tears
+rolled faster than Miss Cora's.
+
+"Stop!" said the awful voice of Mrs. Denton. "How dare you stand
+there and tell me what is false? Don't you know, you wicked child,
+that Miss Cora had the dress on only last evening? That at tea time
+it was in perfect order? That you were missing with colored inks all
+the afternoon—foolish woman that I was to allow it!—and that when Miss
+Cora changed the dress in my room at dusk, for her street one, she sent
+you up-stairs with it, and here it is this morning lying across the
+sofa where yen were told to put it, utterly ruined with the ink that
+you, and you only, put on it? Naughty, wicked girl! I wouldn't have
+believed that you could be so vindictive. Miss Cora says you slammed
+the door as hard as you could last night, just because she reproved you
+for brushing past Mr. Stuart's chair instead of going behind it as you
+ought; and to think that you should have taken such a horrid revenge!"
+
+Poor, red-faced Hester! What could she say or do? There was just one
+part of this dreadful story that was true. She had felt cross at Miss
+Cora for reproving her before Mr. Stuart, and she had slammed the door.
+She remembered it well. The thought of it made her cheeks burn with
+shame. But oh, to think that she was accused of inking that beautiful
+silk dress, on purpose, too, and for revenge! What should she do? It
+seemed of no use to say again that she didn't do it; for she could
+hardly expect them to believe her. She had been amusing herself for a
+whole bright hour with those lovely colored inks, and she was the only
+one who had touched the silk dress after tea. How could the ink have
+got on it? She didn't know. All that she could do was to cry. This
+she did. She covered her face with her apron, and with one long, loud
+wail, that, if Miss Cora's face had not been buried in the bedclothes,
+might have gone to her heart, fled away to that attic room, there to
+throw herself on the foot of the bed, and cry as though her heart would
+break. And truly Hester thought that it would.
+
+She did not know how many hours afterwards it was that she heard her
+name called at the foot of the stairs.
+
+"Hester!" There was nothing for it but to take her tear-stained face
+and sore little heart down-stairs.
+
+                          TO BE CONTINUED.
+
+                            ————————————
+
+
+
+                   A DAY THAT JOHNNY NEVER FORGOT.
+
+                      BY MRS. C. M. LIVINGSTON.
+
+IT was a bright winter morning, and it was Saturday. It was early
+yet—only half-past six—but Johnny Blynn was up and dressed.
+
+[Illustration: THE BEGINNING OF THE DAY.]
+
+He got up early now mostly—ever since he had a room to himself. He
+was in a hurry to use his pretty blue washbowl and his new stiff hair
+brush, and look about his beautiful room and think how nice it was
+to be in there alone like any gentleman making his toilet, the door
+locked, and even mamma not coming in without knocking.
+
+It was a nice room. It had pea-green furniture, because that was
+Johnny's favorite color. There were a pretty gray carpet with a green
+border, and white muslin curtains at the window, and pictures on the
+walls.
+
+He did his work nicely. He was careful not to spill water, nor spatter
+the drops about, although he washed himself till his face looked like
+a pink and white morning-glory dripping with dew, then he brushed his
+yellow curls, and dressed himself in his navy-blue suit. How like a
+gentleman he looked when it was all done, his collar white as snow,
+his necktie in a neat bow, everything all right, even his finger-nails
+clean and white as any lady's.
+
+He had one thing more to do before he went down-stairs. He drew his
+rocking-chair near the register, and took his Bible and read a few
+verses, then he knelt down and prayed. This part of his duties was
+not so well done as the other had been. The Bible verses were gabbled
+off as fast as he could make his tongue go. As to the prayer, the
+words were all right. He asked God to bless him and make him a good
+boy—obedient and kind, and keep him from being naughty to anybody, but
+he was so busy thinking whether it was likely the creek was frozen
+hard enough to skate on, that he scarcely knew what he was saying. He
+hurried through the prayer and went down-stairs as fast as he could go.
+
+In the dining-room was sister Nellie, standing by the grate warming her
+hands. Johnny seized hold of one of her long braids and gave it such
+a twitch that the blue ribbon that tied it came near falling into the
+fire.
+
+Then Johnny laughed, and Nellie said impatiently, as she twitched at
+the knot in the ribbon:
+
+"It's too bad! When I had my hair all ready for breakfast."
+
+"Hair for breakfast! Ho! Ho!" shouted Johnny, dancing teasingly about
+her. "Whoever heard tell of such a thing?"
+
+Then did Nellie's patience vanish entirely, and she sprang up to give
+Johnny a good shake, but he darted away and ran out-of-doors, appearing
+soon in the kitchen, much to the dismay of Bridget who was flurrying
+about trying to dish up breakfast. If there was anybody in the world
+that Bridget didn't want to see in the kitchen, it was Johnny; so as
+soon as he bounced in, she said:
+
+"Now get out of this, Johnny Blynn, this very minute!"
+
+But Johnny seized the spoon that was in the batter-cakes, shouting,
+"I'll bake cakes for you."
+
+Then he tried to put a cake on the griddle. He plunged the spoon deep
+into the batter and carried it dripping across the table, and floor,
+and stove, and splashed it on to the griddle.
+
+Then Bridget seized both the spoon and the boy, put the spoon in the
+dish and the boy through the open door, then shut and locked it, saying
+wrathfully, as she put him out, "You're the very worst boy in this
+world!"
+
+This was a specimen of that whole day. He could not go out to skate,
+because his mother said he was too hoarse to play out-of-doors such
+a cold day, and such a day as they had of it! If Johnny's business
+had been to torment everybody, make them lose their tempers and upset
+nerves generally, he would have been a master-hand at business, for he
+went from one thing to another as fast as possible, never once stopping
+to rest himself.
+
+He dropped papa's watch, and spilt the ink, and tipped over mamma's
+work-basket, and quarreled with Nellie, played pranks on Bridget,
+worried the cat, and teased the dog, till about four o'clock in the
+afternoon; and then something happened.
+
+From the window he saw two ladies coming to call upon his mother, and
+immediately he ran into the parlor and hid behind the folding-doors,
+when, as they stood open, were nice little corners behind them. "It
+will be such fun," he said to himself, "to hear what they say when they
+think they are all alone."
+
+So, while they waited for his mother to come down, they talked. They
+were friends of her school-girl days, and one of them had not seen her
+for several years. They talked in low tones, but Johnny could hear
+every word they said. One lady said to the other:
+
+"Cornelia has a pleasant home."
+
+"Yes," the other answered; "and Mr. Blynn is a very fine man."
+
+"She has two children, you said. Are they nice children?"
+
+"Why, yes, they are very smart and handsome. Nellie is a sweet child,
+but Johnny is a perfect little torment. His mother spent the day with
+me when I lived out at Riverdale, and she brought him along. He kept
+my nerves on the stretch all day. There wasn't a thing on the mantel
+or table but he must have hold of. I expected everything would go to
+shivers that he touched, he was so rough. He brought mud on my carpet,
+and trod on the lace curtains, and put his feet on the sofa, and his
+mother kept saying, 'Johnny, don't! Johnny, stop!' And Johnny never
+obeyed until he was spoken to three times. I guess his mother was glad
+when night came; and I'm sure I was. I thought Cornelia would succeed
+better in training children; she certainly has made a great failure in
+this case."
+
+[Illustration: HOW THE DAY ENDED.]
+
+"What a pity that she should have such a burden to carry; you said her
+health was frail."
+
+"Yes, very; I should not be surprised if she did not live very long."
+
+Just then the door opened, and Mrs. Blynn came into the room. Johnny
+peeped through the crack at her—his sweet, beautiful mother; how pretty
+she looked, dressed in white, with pink cheeks and bright eyes! What
+dreadful thing was this he had just heard; his mamma die!—How could it
+be? He had never thought of such a thing in his life. How he wished he
+could get out of that place and go up to his room. He wanted to cry out
+loud.
+
+To think, too, that anybody should speak of him in that way—"a perfect
+little torment!" Oh, it was too dreadful! Had he really done all those
+awful things when he was at Mrs. Graham's last summer? He rolled over
+on the floor and had hard work to keep from screaming outright.
+
+Just then what did Mrs. Blynn say but:
+
+"Is not this draught too strong for you, Mrs. Graham?" And arising,
+closed the folding-doors, when behold! curled in a heap in the corner
+was Johnny.
+
+"Why!" said mamma.
+
+But Johnny waited to hear no more. A dart and a bound took him through
+the door, and on he went up to his own room, where he cried himself
+almost sick; but while he cried, he did more thinking than ever he had
+in his short life before.
+
+"Nobody shall ever call me a torment again," he said with a long-drawn
+sob. "I'll show 'em my mother does know how to bring up children; I
+will!"
+
+Don't suppose that Johnny grew to be a wonderfully good boy all at once
+after that big resolve. He tried to keep it, but he kept forgetting and
+doing the same naughty things day after day. He told it all to mamma
+one night—how it was of no use for him to try and be good; he "just
+couldn't!"
+
+And then mamma said:
+
+"Johnny, dear, don't you know you must pray just as you play, with all
+your heart, and your heart must run to Jesus when you feel that you are
+tempted to be naughty, just as you call after me when you are in any
+danger?"
+
+That made the way plainer, and everybody began soon to say, "Johnny is
+certainly growing to be a better boy."
+
+                            ————————————
+
+
+
+                THREE LITTLE M'S.—A THREE-PART STORY.
+
+                         BY MARGARET SIDNEY.
+
+MATILDA, Martha, and Mary. That's what folks called them.
+
+As to their looks, they were as alike as three peas in a pod. Even
+their father, good fat old Mr. Poser, who kept the small shop where the
+cross-roads met, said, "'Tain't in natur' to know which is the other,
+unless you see 'em a-workin'."
+
+And this is the way they worked—these three little M's. "Two," I should
+say, for alas! one of these dear little girls was never a worker at
+all. Although Matilda, the eldest, skipped around the small shop, busy
+as a bee, helping father every day, and Martha, the next one, minded
+the house, little Mary, the youngest of the bunch, let them work alone
+while she tried to have a good time in her own naughty little way. For
+she didn't believe in making life beautiful in the way God has intended
+for all children as well as great folks, by cheerful, faithful labor,
+that makes play-time when it comes just twice as jolly because earned.
+Not she! She wanted high holiday "all" the time, and so she made her
+father very unhappy, and the tears to trail down from the little
+sister's big brown eyes very often, all because she "would" have her
+own way, and spend every day in running and racing here, there, and
+everywhere, for something new to look at.
+
+Was she happy? Can a little child be, who turns her back on duty? And
+didn't she ever stop that bad, bad habit? Well, we'll see. Stay! I'll
+whisper it to you beforehand—my answer. Yes, she "did" stop, and all
+because of—and here's my story!
+
+"Oh, dear, dear, 'dear!'"
+
+Fat Mr. Poser sat right down on the cover of a butter-tub, although
+it was the busiest day in the week—Saturday—and just wrung his hands,
+which were like two small pincushions.
+
+"What's the matter, pa?" cried Matilda, taking, by a violent effort,
+her eyes from off the jar of pink and white peppermint sticks. "Oh,
+what 'is' the matter?" And she ran over to his side.
+
+But the fat shop-keeper only groaned, and unclasped the two pincushions
+enough to disclose in their centre a bright silver quarter of a dollar.
+
+"'There!'" at last he said.
+
+"Oh, my!" exclaimed Matilda, her eyes as big as good-sized cups;
+"that's Mrs. Smith's change."
+
+"I know it," said Mr. Poser. Then he groaned again; and getting up from
+the butter-tub, he waddled to the door.
+
+[Illustration: "OH, DEAR, DEAR!"]
+
+"'Ma-a-ry!'" he called, as loud as he could scream.
+
+A small blue gown, and a little red hood, that were flying past, came
+to a full stop.
+
+"Now you trot right straight off to Mrs. Smith's house in Crow Hollow
+as fast as you can trot, an' tell her she left this quarter, after
+buying that chopping-bowl this morning."
+
+At that, there came such a whine from the little red hood, that
+Mr. Poser cried sternly, "You might as well stretch your legs for
+somethin'. Start now, an' don't you stop anywheres! 'Mind!'"
+
+The whine ceased suddenly, as the blue gown and little red hood took
+themselves slowly out of the big gate. For the first half-mile or more,
+Mary went on quite steadily. Then she began to sigh—a sigh that soon
+broke out into a dismal cry—a cry that only half made itself heard, for
+the very good reason that Mary stopped to wink her eyes so violently,
+she had no time to attend to anything else.
+
+"Why—why—ee!" she cried to herself and the birds. "'Folks have moved
+into the dungeon!'"
+
+The "dungeon" was an old rambling stone mansion down on the edge of
+the wood, unoccupied since the old squire had died, and given up to
+the crows and the bats. Mary grasped her silver quarter tightly in her
+little fist, while her two naughty feet began to carry her up to the
+big green door.
+
+"I'll take 'one' look," she whispered to her conscience; "only 'one;'
+then I'll run all the faster to Mrs. Smith's."
+
+But that "one look" showed her a pair of cunning little rabbits just
+inside the barn-door, nibbling a cabbage-leaf.
+
+"I wish 'I' had rabbits," she said, wistfully gazing at them. "I'm
+going to ask the folks in there to let me play with 'em sometime. Maybe
+there's a girl as big as me lives here. I mean to see."
+
+So Mary stepped up a steep flight of short stairs leading into the
+house, and was just going in, when a big black dog running suddenly
+out, met her at the top, and coming to a full stop, showed all his
+teeth and gave "such" a bark, that the little girl turned around in a
+twinkling, and began to scuttle down the stairs with all her might.
+
+The dog came tumbling after, barking violently at every step.
+Frightened almost to death, Mary flew along the barn floor, out into a
+dirty little court-yard, and, just in time to keep the little blue gown
+from a sharp snip of the white, gleaming teeth, she plunged against a
+door that stood conveniently open, threw herself on its other side,
+slammed it to, and tumbled down in a small heap on a pile of potatoes,
+to draw a long breath.
+
+[Illustration: A PRISONER IN THE CORN-CHAMBER.]
+
+It was a little room, all filled with corn piled up in small bins with
+heaps of cobs thrown down just where children's busy fingers had been
+shelling; bags of meal fresh from the mill, and everywhere else that
+anything could be stowed, were heaps and heaps of potatoes. All this
+while the dog was howling away smartly outside.
+
+"Hum—hum—'hum!'" said Mary, trying to catch her breath. "Oh, me, ain't
+I tired, though! Now when that dog goes away, I'll go right straight
+off to Mrs. Smith's. I don't want to see any more of these folks. 'Why!
+Where's—my—quarter!'"
+
+For her fat little palm was empty.
+
+Just then a loud voice struck up, outside the old door:
+
+"Come off, Bose! 'Sharp,' sir."
+
+"Er-r-'oof!'" Patter, patter, patter, went the dog's feet, as he
+unwillingly obeyed, leaving Mary to wriggle in delight at her escape.
+
+"Now, then," she was just going to say, when, "click—'snap!'" went the
+key in the lock, and before she quite knew it, she was fast a prisoner
+in the old corn-chamber.
+
+                          TO BE CONTINUED.
+
+                            ————————————
+
+
+
+                         TWENTY-FOUR HOURS.
+
+"FIZZ! Sizzle!" said the mixture in the big pot on the stove. Miss
+Penelope stirred it, looking meantime so grim that it might almost have
+soured the mixture, whatever it was.
+
+The kitchen was in after-dinner order; the stove shone brightly—the
+only bright thing to be seen, for the sun could not look in, and
+furniture was very scarce.
+
+Suddenly the door opened, and a rush of cold air came in, with a few
+flakes of snow, and a pretty girl, in a green flannel suit, with a
+green velvet hat to match.
+
+"Did you say come?" she asked in a cheery voice. "The wind blows so I
+couldn't tell. Miss Penelope, mamma wants to know if I may come and
+stay twenty-four hours with you? She was called away very suddenly, and
+she didn't know what to do with me."
+
+[Illustration: "DID YOU SAY COME?"]
+
+"'Well,'" said Miss Penelope, after standing up straight, and looking
+at her visitor in amazed silence for a minute, "I should think you
+'had' come!"
+
+The pretty girl laughed a silvery laugh. "That is true," she said,
+stepping in, and closing the heavy door. "Mamma didn't know what else
+to do; she was in 'such' a flurry. The telegram never came until about
+an hour before the last train; it was from my uncle in the city. Mamma
+doesn't know him very much, and I never saw him in my life; but it
+seems he is 'very' sick, and wants to see mamma. She thought she ought
+to go, but of course she couldn't take me, and she said she knew you
+would take care of me until the four o'clock train to-morrow, when she
+would come back: she didn't like to trust me anywhere else. So I have
+my brush and comb, and all my night things in this bag."
+
+"Humph!" said Miss Penelope. "Sit down, and take off your things."
+
+Her face was, if possible, grimmer than before. If there was any one
+thing that she disliked more than flies, and dogs, and tramps, it
+was visitors. She never had them if she could possibly help it. The
+green-dressed maiden's mother, who had known her all her life, and took
+more liberties with her than anybody else, never ventured to come to
+tea; yet here she had sent her daughter to stay twenty-four hours.
+
+"Whatever shall I do with her, or say to her?" said Miss Penelope,
+dashing around her kitchen like a great frightened fly.
+
+But the first thing to do was to get her some supper, as the
+old-fashioned clock in the corner said "almost five o'clock." Miss
+Penelope never was known to have supper one minute after five o'clock.
+
+The new-comer, whose name was Helena, did not seem uncomfortable in
+the least. She hung up her own hat and sack, then hovered around Miss
+Penelope.
+
+"Let me set the table, please," she said eagerly; "I always do for
+mamma. It will seem so funny to eat supper without her."
+
+She did not wait for permission, but helped herself to two
+old-fashioned blue and white plates, two cups and saucers, and the
+quaint little sugar-bowl, exclaiming as she did so over the pretty
+pictures on them.
+
+Miss Penelope seemed too much astonished to speak. When had her table
+ever been set "for" her before! In fact, she could not remember the
+time. But she could remember the time when it was always set for two.
+Not very long ago, her old mother sat at the foot of the table.
+
+It was in the evening, when the kitchen was trim and proper again, and
+the old-fashioned lamp was lighted, and Miss Penelope sewed on a "very"
+dark calico apron, large enough to cover her all up, that Helena said:
+"I brought my Bible among my night things; shall I get it and read my
+verses aloud, as I do to mamma?"
+
+What could Miss Penelope do but give a sort of grunt for assent; of
+course, being a decent woman, she couldn't very well refuse to have a
+chapter in the Bible read to her, though the old mother had been the
+only one who had ever done it.
+
+So the clear voice of the young reader commenced: "And there came a
+leper to him, beseeching him, and kneeling down to him, and saying
+unto him: If thou wilt thou canst make me clean. And Jesus, moved with
+compassion, put forth his hand, and touched him, and saith unto him,
+I will, be thou clean. And as soon as he had spoken, immediately the
+leprosy departed from him, and he was cleansed."
+
+"Only think how quick!" said Helena, looking up with shining eyes.
+"Just for the 'asking!' Oh, Miss Penelope, don't you wish Jesus was
+on earth now? Then uncle might have asked Him to make 'him' well, and
+mamma need not have gone away; but that is silly, I know; He can hear
+us just as well, and do just as much for us; only the trouble people
+is, people won't 'ask.' Uncle never asks Him for anything, mamma says.
+It sometimes seems to me if such people could 'see' Him they would ask
+Him for what they need: but I don't suppose they would. Mamma says
+they would be like those people who wanted Him to go away out of their
+country and not bother them."
+
+Then she went on with her reading.
+
+Miss Penelope did not hear much more. Her heart went back to the day
+when her old mother had read her that very story, and how she told of
+the time when "she" asked Him for healing, and he gave t; and then the
+tired old voice would say: "Oh, Penelope, my girl, I wish you would go
+to Him!" Penelope never had.
+
+The next day passed busily to Helena. A telegram came for her. She was
+to be put on the four-thirty train, and go to the city; mamma would
+meet her at the depot.
+
+Helena never came back to the little village. The old uncle died—not
+then, nor the next day, nor the next, but after weeks of pain.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+He left all his money to Helena's mother, and the little bit of a
+cottage home where she and her daughter used to live, was broken up,
+and they lived in the grand city home. Helena never saw Miss Penelope
+again; for, strange to say, before the uncle died, God called for the
+lonely old woman. So Helena doesn't know yet, but some day when she
+goes to heaven she will—for there will be a bright star in her crown,
+and when she inquires for whom it shines, she will learn in great
+astonishment that it stands for the soul of Miss Penelope, who was led,
+through those simple, earnest words of hers, and through the words read
+to her from the Bible that was among her "night things," to go herself
+and "ask Jesus."
+
+                            ————————————
+
+
+
+                                P. S.
+
+NOW, what does that stand for? Not "Postscript," because every one is
+to be told the first thing. So all you bright Pansies, now listen!
+
+"P. S." forever and forever, and then again forever after this stands
+for—
+
+   "PANSY SOCIETY!"
+
+And it is to be all our own? Yes, indeed! And we are to have all the
+say about it too? Yes, indeed! again.
+
+Now, then, "who will join? What shall be our motto? What shall we do?
+How shall we do it? Where shall we meet? When shall we meet? What will
+come of it?"
+
+Oh, wait—wait—wait! You fairly overwhelm me with questions. It is late,
+and this paper should go to press. I can't answer now. Let me give just
+a little hint.
+
+In the first place, the name is the "PANSY SOCIETY." That's settled.
+Then the motto comes, and that is "Pansies for Thoughts." What kind of
+thoughts? Oh, sweet, good, pure, unselfish, helpful thoughts, such as
+Pansies, beautiful Pansies, ought to inspire.
+
+And we'll have a badge? Of course we will! Whoever heard of a society
+without a badge. And ours will be the most beautiful in all the world.
+That's settled, too. Just hear what it is going to be. The most
+beautiful round locket of wood, on the face of which is a lovely pansy,
+naturally colored. Above is the name, "PANSY SOCIETY," underneath the
+motto, "Pansies for Thoughts." A perforation at the top holds the
+ribbon to suspend the locket on the neck.
+
+Now, "who may join?"
+
+Every boy and girl who takes the PANSY, and is willing to promise to
+try to overcome his or her faults, to encourage every good impulse, to
+try to conquer some hard lesson at school, to do "anything" that shows
+a disposition to help the cause of right in the world. Any one who will
+say from the heart: "I promise to try each day to do some kind act, or
+say some kind word that shall help somebody;" and honest effort will
+be rewarded as much as if success were gained. Whoever will promise
+this shall receive the badge "at once," on sending notice of such
+determination to the editor.
+
+This promise must be dated, and will be copied into the "P. S."
+roll-book. Each child is invited to write to the editor how far the
+trial has proved a success, how many temptations have been resisted,
+how much progress in any direction has been made, etc., feeling sure of
+encouragement and loving help.
+
+And we will have some beautiful books of our own to read, which all the
+"P. S." people can get for much less money than anybody else. We will
+have local meetings. If any of you want to ask, "what in the world are
+those?" Go to mother, or father, or big brother John. They will tell
+you.
+
+That is enough for now—excepting the most important of all—our whisper
+motto: "I will do it for Jesus' sake."
+
+   "FOR JESUS' SAKE."
+
+Whatever He will own, the "P. S." will be proud and glad to copy on its
+roll-book.
+
+And the PANSY will help. As it has always been glad to encourage those
+who are struggling up toward the light, so now it reaches forth its
+helping hand to those little ones who will rally bravely around it, to
+the work of putting down the evil, and the support of all things good
+and beautiful. That is all for now. Just a hint in a hurry; more next
+month.
+
+Meantime, how many names shall we receive? Send postal-card with name
+to D. LOTHROP & CO., 32 Franklin St., Boston, Mass.
+
+                            ————————————
+
+
+
+[Illustration: SARAH LAMBERT.]
+
+                            SIDE BY SIDE.
+
+[PART I.]
+
+   BEHOLD I WILL SEND MY MESSENGER, AND HE SHALL PREPARE THE WAY
+BEFORE ME.
+
+   THE PEOPLE THAT WALKED IN DARKNESS HAVE SEEN A GREAT LIGHT.
+
+   I, EVEN I, AM HE THAT BLOTTETH OUT THY TRANSGRESSSIONS FOR MINE OWN
+SAKE, AND WILL NOT REMEMBER THY SINS.
+
+   REMEMBER THE SABBATH DAY, TO KEEP IT HOLY.
+
+SARAH LAMBERT lived with her mother in one room over Mr. Dunlap's
+stable. The stairs leading up to it were narrow and steep and dark.
+The room was dark when you reached it; only one window, with small,
+old-fashioned panes of glass. The window was dirty, too, and trimmed
+with cobwebs. There were two wooden-seated chairs, a poor bedstead, a
+table of the old-fashioned kind, with one leaf gone, a cooking-stove
+that smoked, of course, as all worn-out stoves do, and that stood on
+three legs, its door hanging by one hinge.
+
+In this room one winter morning, Sarah Lambert washed her face from
+a tin basin, on a corner of one chair, snarled at her tangled hair a
+few minutes with a broken comb, put on a pair of ragged stockings and
+ragged shoes, and, over some very thin and old undergarments, a dark
+brown calico dress, patched in three places, wound a piece of brown
+and white plaid shawl about her, put on a gray felt hat without any
+trimming, and without any breakfast stole out of the room.
+
+Her mother was still sleeping, though the sun was high. She went to bed
+the night before intending to sleep until she was ready to wake up; for
+she knew that the next day would be Sunday. As for Sarah, she was going
+to Sunday-school, whatever that meant; she had promised a lady the day
+before that she would.
+
+[Illustration: SIDE BY SIDE.]
+
+Ethol Harrison lived with her father and mother and brothers and
+sisters in the great stone house three squares away from Sarah
+Lambert's. The room in which she slept late that Sunday morning had a
+crimson carpet on the floor, and crimson curtains at the windows, and
+costly and elegant furniture.
+
+When Ethol had eaten a breakfast of broiled chicken, and toast, and
+canned fruit, she was dressed by Hannah in a dark blue velvet suit
+with hat to match, having a long white plume winding all about it, kid
+gloves on her bits of hands, and kid boots on her bright stockinged
+feet, lovely white furs, cape, and muff, to crown all, and she too went
+to Sunday-school.
+
+Behold, she and Sarah Lambert sat side by side in the bright room full
+of people. Ethol smoothed down her new velvet dress, and buttoned her
+glove, and tossed back her plume, and smiled and nodded to her friends,
+and Sarah sat like a statue at her side and stared. She had never seen
+such a light, bright, beautiful room as that in her life. Both of the
+girls received cards with the words on them that are at the head of
+this story. Both girls read them at once, for Sarah went to day-school
+and knew how to read. They were new words to her. She was so astonished
+over them, that she forgot her awe of Ethol and nudged at the blue
+velvet sack nod whispered:
+
+"What was it?"
+
+"What was 'what?'"
+
+"That great light; where was it—what did it show them?"
+
+Then Ethol giggled.
+
+"Miss Mason," she said, "this little girl wants to know what they saw
+by the great light."
+
+Miss Mason turned to Sarah, whose checks were now very red.
+
+"Don't you know who the light is, dear?" she said gently.
+
+"No," said Sarah, but she felt comforted. Miss Mason's voice made her
+think of the music that she heard as she passed the church.
+
+"It means Jesus, my child; you know the world was very dark until he
+came."
+
+"Wasn't there any sun to shine?" asked Sarah; and Ethol giggled again.
+
+"Yes; but I don't mean that kind of darkness. I mean full of sin, and
+sorrow, and trouble; and the people did not know the way out. While He
+was here they used to bring sick people to him; those whom no doctor
+could cure; and he would just touch them, or speak to them, and they
+would be well at once."
+
+"I don't believe it," said Sarah, promptly.
+
+And Ethol said: "Oh-h! What a wicked girl!"
+
+"That is what some of the people said who were looking on," Miss Mason
+told her. "'They' wouldn't believe in the great light though Jesus gave
+them so many reasons for believing. Open your Bibles, girls. Here is
+one for you, Sarah. Let us read the story about the sick woman who was
+cured of fever in an instant."
+
+Sarah looked at the place pointed out to her, and listened, and read
+when her turn came; she had never heard of such a thing in her life.
+She asked a great many questions, and amused Ethol so much that she
+almost forgot her new hat with its long plume.
+
+"Where has he gone?" asked, Sarah, suddenly, interrupting Miss Mason in
+the middle of a sentence. "Where has this great doctor gone to?"
+
+Then Miss Mason tried to explain, that though he had gone back to
+heaven, his spirit was here and could do just as great and wonderful
+things as ever.
+
+"He can't cure people in a minute now." said Sarah, positively; "'cause
+Mr. Dunlap's Nettie was awful sick, and had doctors and doctors, and
+she died. If this man could have cured her, Mr. Dunlap would have had
+him, for he loved her just awful."
+
+"Did you ever 'see' such a girl?" whispered Ethol to the little girl on
+her left. "Why, she is a perfect heathen."
+
+Well, the Sunday-school was over, and Sarah took her motto-card home
+with her, and thought about the verses, and studied them, and read them
+to her mother, and wondered over them, and wished a hundred times a day
+that she could see Jesus just for a minute.
+
+Ethol put her card in her pocket—crumpling it as she did so—and I don't
+think she thought of it again until the next Sabbath morning.
+
+Now I want, during the year 1882, to tell you a good deal about these
+two girls who often sat side by side, and stood side by side, and
+walked side by side, and yet were so different. You will see if you
+keep watch of their lives, that the difference between them reached
+beyond their clothes, and their homes, even into their hearts. But you
+must wait until next month to hear more. The name of this story, each
+month, will be, "Side by Side."
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+                          "THE OTHER ONE."
+
+"SOME folks has everything, and some folks has nothing."
+
+This is precisely what the sour-faced little girl, Hannah Bancroft,
+thought as she stood in the doorway and saw Helen's mother bend
+over the bed and kiss her. Hannah was this favored Helen's little
+nurse-girl, who had not yet been in the house twelve hours, and was
+taking her first peep at Helen and Helen's room. She had never seen
+such a beautiful room before in her life! Lovely carpet, that looked as
+though somebody had been to the woods for mosses and ferns, and strewn
+them all over the room. Lovely paper on the wall, that on the stormiest
+winter days made the room look as though a golden sun was setting. Soft
+couches and easy-chairs, and a mantel filled with many pretty things.
+She thought of the one in which she had slept only two nights before;
+no carpet on the floor, no mantel at all, no chairs, only a wooden one
+with three legs, and part of the back broken off.
+
+"I've something for my darling when she gets up," the mother said,
+bending over Helen. "A nice surprise."
+
+"Mamma, you always have nice surprises," said the little girl with a
+low, happy laugh.
+
+"This is the nicest one mamma has found in many a day," the mother said
+and she began to make preparations for the little girl to get up.
+
+"Lazy thing!" said Hannah to herself. "Lying there and letting her
+mother hunt her shoes, and pick up her things. Why don't she bound out
+and wait on herself? She is just horrid; I know she is."
+
+[Illustration: "MAMMA, YOU ALWAYS HAVE NICE SURPRISES," SAID THE LITTLE
+GIRL.]
+
+"Now, darling," said the mother, and she bent over the bed again, and
+to Hannah's great surprise lifted the slight little form in her arms
+and carried her to an easy-chair. Then Hannah saw that the poor little
+feet were much smaller than they ought to be, and that there was a
+bandage around one of them.
+
+"Didn't you know that you were to be feet for my little girl?" Mrs.
+Stevens said, speaking to Hannah, an she saw her startled face.
+
+"Can't she walk at all?" was her dismayed answer.
+
+"Not now," the mother said, gently; "she is going to some day, we hope.
+You may come in now."
+
+"Mamma," she said, "I can go visiting now whenever I want to, can't I?"
+And that happy little laugh gurgled out; then almost in the same breath
+she said: "Mamma, what about the other one?"
+
+"I don't know about that yet," the mother said. "I will leave you to
+plan for it."
+
+"The other one," muttered Hannah. "What can she want of two?" The
+sullen look had come back.
+
+"Don't you think my new carriage is lovely?" Helen ventured this to the
+gloomy-faced little girl.
+
+"Yes 'm," said Hannah absently; "yes 'm, I s'pose so."
+
+"But you don't think you would like it as well as walking?"—this with
+the least bit of a sigh. "I like it very much, though; it is such a
+rest to me. I haven't walked a step in two years."
+
+She expected to see the gloomy face change into one of surprise and
+pity; but Hannah said, speaking almost fiercely: "I know a boy who
+hasn't walked a step in five years."
+
+"Oh dear me!" There was instant sympathy in Helen's voice. "Who is he?
+What is the matter with him? How old is he?"
+
+"He's my brother," said Hannah in a gentler tone. "He is most twelve
+years old, but he is so little and weak, you wouldn't think he was six.
+I can carry him just as easy! He had a very had fall when he was seven,
+and he won't never walk again."
+
+"Poor little fellow! And has he a wheeled chair, and a couch that can
+be raised and let down, and a sponge pillow when his head aches, and
+oh! I don't know: all sorts of nice things?"
+
+"No," said Hannah, the sullen look coming back; "he ain't got nothing
+only a hard bed, and a chair with a cushion in, that mother made out of
+our old quilt."
+
+"Then I have found the 'other one' already," said Helen joyfully.
+
+"What?" said Hannah.
+
+And Helen laughed.
+
+"You don't know what I mean. Why, you see long ago, when papa and mamma
+began to get me so many things to help me bear my trouble, we planned
+it that there should always be two bought, and the other one should be
+given to somebody who needed it, and couldn't spare the money to get
+it. So I know there is another one of these lovely chairs, and your
+poor little brother shall be in it before night."
+
+Sure enough, the widow Bancroft received, just at noon, the
+strangest-looking parcel! It could only by great coaxing be gotten up
+her narrow stairs. All the rest—what the pale little fellow who had not
+walked a step in five years thought, and felt, and said, when he found
+himself actually going across the room on wheels, and what the mother
+thought as the tears rolled down her cheeks, and what Hannah thought
+as she looked on and remembered her cross sentence: "Some folks has
+everything, and some folks has nothing,"—I will leave you to imagine.
+
+But then, you must remember that in the morning she had not heard
+anything about "the other one."
+
+                            ————————————
+
+
+
+                   THE THREE LITTLE M'S.—PART II.
+
+                        BY MARGARET SIDNEY.
+
+FOR the first two or three moments, Mary was too frightened to think of
+anything but her heartbeats, which certainly, it seemed to her, must be
+heard a mile away.
+
+"I wish—" thump, thump, thump,—"I'd—been—good," at last she gasped out
+in a muffled sob. "Oh dear, dear! I want to go—home to—'father!'"
+
+Awl with a low wail of despair, she flung herself, a little heap of
+woe, on an old potato bag, and shut her eyes tight.
+
+A wise old rat peered out from behind a pile of corn, stopping his
+nibbling long enough to stare at her.
+
+"That child has been doing something wrong," he nodded sagely to
+himself; and his little eyes gleamed. "'I' know the signs. Now I'm
+going to scare her."
+
+Thereupon, he rattled so suddenly among the dry kernels on the old
+floor that Mary shivered with fright.
+
+"I shall be killed!" she cried, stuffing back her tears, to bound up
+into a sitting posture. "Oh, it's rats! And they'll eat me, every
+single speck of me, bones and all! Oh dear, dear, dear!"
+
+With a wild fling of his hind legs, Mr. Rat flew across the little room
+from corner to corner, making such a noise that the little prisoner
+screamed in very terror.
+
+"I—never—will—be—bad—again." And then over she tumbled in a swoon.
+
+Meantime, the little shop was all astir with excitement because the
+youngest of the bunch hadn't come home.
+
+"Pa," exclaimed Martha, the little housekeeper, who, in her anxiety,
+had let all the bread burn to a cinder, "do, oh, do let me run down to
+Mrs. Smith's and see if she's there!"
+
+"Oh, poor Mary!" cried Matilda, wringing her hands. "I know she's lost,
+and she never 'll come home, never, as long as she lives!"
+
+"For the land sakes!" exclaimed Mr. Poser, throwing a stubby pencil,
+with which he was vainly trying to cast up accounts, down on the
+well-worn counter. "You'll worry the life out of me, some of you will;
+an' then 'I' shall be dead. There! Reach me my hat an' stick, Marthy.
+I'll go myself."
+
+[Illustration: GOING TO FIND MARY.]
+
+"I don't worry you, pa," said Matilda in a grieved may, turning back
+from the small cracked window out of which she was peering into the
+gathering dusk, for the first glimpse of the familiar little red hood.
+
+"And I'm sure 'I' don't," broke in Martha, in a dreadfully injured
+tone, as she handed up the articles mentioned. "Do take that back, pa,"
+she begged.
+
+"Well, somebody does," said the old gentleman doggedly, putting his hat
+on his head with no gentle thrust, and grasping his stick, "so what
+odds does it make 'who' 'tis. There, keep a sharp eye on the shop,
+Matildy; an', Marthy, run along to your work. I'll be back soon."
+
+But he got no further than the door, for a big woman with a very
+determined face was marching in, and now confronted him sharply.
+
+"Good day to you, Mr. Poser!" she exclaimed, with more the air of a
+policeman than an ordinary visitor, "I'd like to inquire where my
+quarter of a dollar is. 'Tisn't often a chopping-bowl is so very high
+as the one I bought this morning. Not 'very' often."
+
+"'Your quarter of a dollar!'" repeated the fat shop-keeper, glaring at
+his visitor in sheer astonishment. "Why, hain't you got it? Where's my
+Mary?" he demanded, in a tone to match hers in sharpness.
+
+"I don't know where your Mary is, nor any other folks' Mary," declared
+Mrs. Smith irritably, "an' I'm sure I don't care. All I want is my
+quarter of a dollar. I'd thank you for that."
+
+"I sent it by my youngest little gal," said Mr. Poser, on a high key,
+and punching his stick on the floor to emphasize each word, "four good
+hours ago. Hain't you seen her?"
+
+In the babel that followed of tears and bewailings on the part of the
+two little sisters, Mrs. Smith protested three times solemnly on her
+word and honor, that she had not seen Mary Poser that day. Then she
+straightway magnanimously forgot the loss of her precious quarter of a
+dollar, and turned comforter at once.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"Oh, you'll find her," she said cheeringly; "don't be afraid. A girl
+like her, such a run-about, always turns up like a cat."
+
+"There's a last time to everythin'," said Mr. Poser solemnly, "an' I
+guess Mary's run herself out this time."
+
+Which encouraging statement caused such fresh wails of despair, that
+Mrs. Smith was nearly frantic.
+
+"Hush-sh!" she exclaimed warningly. "You'll have the house down around
+your ears, if you don't look out, with all your noise. I'll go an' see
+if I can't find her. There, do be still!"
+
+"I'll go, too," said Mr. Poser, waddling to the door.
+
+"And I'm going, too! Oh, I am!" cried Matilda, rushing after him to
+grasp his hand.
+
+"And I ain't going to stay home alone," exclaimed Martha, flying up,
+the tears running down her chubby face; "I want to go and look for my
+dear sister too."
+
+"You might as well let 'em come, Mr. Poser," said Mrs. Smith decidedly.
+"They'll scream themselves to death left behind. There now, we'll soon
+find Mary safe and sound."
+
+So the whole procession left the little shop, and started on their
+dismal errand.
+
+                            ————————————
+
+
+
+                            WHO DID IT?
+
+                            PART SECOND.
+
+"HESTER," said Mrs. Denton, still in the "awful" tone, "you have been
+a very ungrateful little girl indeed; I could not have believed it! I
+don't know but I ought to send you dinnerless and supperless to bed to
+spend the day; but I have concluded to give you a chance, even yet, to
+overcome your faults, great as they are. If you will confess the whole
+thing to me from beginning to end, and will go to Miss Cora and say
+that you are bitterly sorry for having been so wicked a girl, I will
+allow you to go to the New Year's party, and say nothing about the
+matter to your teacher for the present, at least; perhaps never, if I
+find you are truly sorry and are trying hard to do right."
+
+Poor Hester! This seemed to hem her in more than ever. Confess what?
+That she had inked the beautiful dress in a fit of rage; and then had
+told falsehood after falsehood to cover the sin?
+
+As she stood before her waiting mistress, thinking it all over, one
+minute her face was pale with fear, and the next it flushed with anger.
+She "wanted so" to go to that party! More, perhaps, than you who have
+been to many parties, can possibly imagine. The fear of giving it up
+made her face pale. Then the thought that her word was not believed,
+and that the only way to get to the party was actually to tell a lie,
+made her face grow red with anger.
+
+"Well," said Mrs. Denton at last, vexed more than ever at her
+hesitation, "it seems to take you a long time to decide. Are you going
+to confess the whole thing to me or not? I assure you I shall not stand
+here waiting very long."
+
+"Oh, ma'am!" burst forth Hester at last, the tears streaming from her
+eyes. "Indeed! Indeed, I have told you the truth. I don't know one
+thing about the pretty dress."
+
+"Leave the room instantly!" was Mrs. Denton's stern command.
+
+And Hester flew sobbing up the stairs into her attic, and threw herself
+on the bed in a perfect passion of weeping.
+
+Even then Mrs. Denton was sorry for her. "It is not so much the loss
+of the dress," she said to her daughters, "though that is enough; but
+to think that the creature will persist in falsehood! And yet I cannot
+help being sorry for her. I suppose she is so frightened about it now,
+that she is actually afraid to confess."
+
+"Poor little wretch!" said Miss Cora, who by this time was dressed in
+her new bottle-green suit, and found that she looked very nice indeed,
+and so felt better. "Mamma, give her another trial. She has never been
+to a party in her life; and she has talked about this one incessantly
+all the week."
+
+So Mrs. Denton, believing herself to be the most patient and forgiving
+of women, sent up word that she would give Hester one hour, even now,
+in which to decide to do right.
+
+Oh! Can I describe to you how awfully tempted poor Hester was then?
+What to do? Why, to say that she had inked the beautiful blue dress!
+
+"Somebody must have done it," sobbed the poor little girl to herself;
+"and they will always think I did it; and they will think I am awful,
+awful wicked; and they will send me to the house of correction, maybe,
+or somewhere, and she said she would forgive me if I would confess.
+She will tell Mrs. Neilson all about it, and she will think I forgot
+all she said to me, and didn't try a bit to do right; and she said she
+would forgive me if I would confess it. Oh dear me! What 'shall' I do?"
+
+Don't you see how Satan came to torment this poor little friendless
+mouse? He actually made her think that it wouldn't be such a dreadful
+thing just to say she was sorry for what she had never done. She told
+herself that she could think in her heart that she only meant she was
+sorry because the blue dress was spoiled, and she was sure that would
+be true. Besides, oh, what an important matter she made of that New
+Year's party! What would all the other girls think was the reason she
+was not there? That fat Anna Parks, who didn't like her a bit and was
+always saying ugly things about her, would be sure to find out why she
+was kept away, and would tell all the girls, and they would believe it,
+and it would do more harm than one poor little story possibly could.
+
+[Illustration: "SOMEBODY MUST HAVE DONE IT," SOBBED HESTER.]
+
+"Oh dear! Oh dear!" she said, hopping up suddenly as she heard a clock
+down in the sitting-room strike the half hour. "The time is almost
+gone, and if I don't do it, I shall have to stay here all day, and all
+night, and be sent away and never see Mrs. Neilson any more, and they
+will never forgive me. Oh, I must! I must!"
+
+                          TO BE CONTINUED.
+
+                            ————————————
+
+
+
+[Illustration: SIDE BY SIDE]
+
+                           SIDE BY SIDE.
+
+[PART II.]
+
+   YE HAVE NOT CHOSEN ME, BUT I HAVE CHOSEN YOU, AND ORDAINED YOU, THAT YE
+SHOULD GO AND BRING FORTH FRUIT, AND THAT YOUR FRUIT SHOULD REMAIN.
+
+   HE THAT IS NOT WITH ME IS AGAINST ME.
+
+   HE THAT HATH AN EAR, LET HIM HEAR WHAT THE SPIRIT SAITH UNTO THE
+CHURCHES.
+
+   THERE SHALL BE A HANDFUL OF CORN IN THE EARTH UPON THE TOP OF THE
+MOUNTAINS; THE FRUIT THEREOF SHALL SHAKE LIKE LEBANON.
+
+THE girls gathered in little groups and talked over the matter.
+Something new to be done. Miss Mason was in charge of their room, and
+in the reading-class that morning had told them of the custom when she
+went to school of "choosing sides and spelling down." These girls and
+boys knew nothing about it, but, most of them had agreed that it would
+be "fun," and at recess they had crowded about Miss Mason, and coaxed
+her to let them have a spelling-match. So this very afternoon it was to
+be tried; and the leaders had already been chosen, one of them being
+Ethol Harrison.
+
+"Our side will beat, you'll see if it won't," she said, tossing back
+her pretty curls. "I know who all the best spellers are, and I'll
+choose them as fast as I can, and the others may keep their seats for
+all I care."
+
+"But Johnnie Burns has every other turn," objected one of the girls;
+"what if he chooses some of the best ones before you get a chance?"
+
+"Oh, he won't!" said Ethol. "Johnnie doesn't think fast enough to know
+who the best spellers are."
+
+Just then Ethol caught sight of Sarah Lambert standing just outside the
+group, looking wistfully at them. Sarah was almost always just outside
+of things.
+
+"Just see that girl stare at us!" Ethol said. "She always looks hungry
+out of her eyes. Did you ever notice? I wonder if she expects to get
+chosen? I shan't choose her, I'm sure."
+
+"She's a pretty good speller, though," answered one of the girls,
+thoughtfully.
+
+"I don't care. I shan't choose her; and I don't believe Johnnie will;
+he won't if I tell him not to. She doesn't belong to us girls. It
+always makes me cross to see her standing around. Her faded old dress,
+and straight, yellow hair, and no ruffle, and worn-out shoes, don't
+match in with the rest of us." And Ethol tossed her curls again, and
+smoothed the overskirt of her handsome all-wool blue dress, and looked
+down at her trim, buttoned boots with an air that said as plainly as
+words: "Could you imagine two people who looked more unlike that Sarah
+Lambert and I?"
+
+Presently the group around the register moved away in different
+directions, but Sarah Lambert's eager eyes followed Ethol. She had
+caught stray words here and there from the girls, and she knew that
+a good deal of the talk had been going on about choosing; so she
+determined to do what took a good deal of courage.
+
+"Did He choose you?" She asked the question eagerly, her great eyes
+looking hungrier than ever.
+
+"Did who choose me?" Ethol's voice was almost cross. "What 'are' you
+talking about? You always begin in the middle of things."
+
+"I want to know if He chose you, and if He has told you what to do, and
+if you know how to do it, and how He let you know that He wanted you?"
+
+Then did Ethol look at her in utter amazement. "Sarah Lambert, I
+believe you are crazy!" she said slowly. "Nobody is to choose me;
+Johnnie Burns and I do the choosing of the others. Of course I know how
+to do it. And as to his wanting me, I don't know what you mean."
+
+The eagerness went out of Sarah's eyes a little.
+
+"I didn't mean about the spelling," she said gravely, "it's about the
+other choosing. Don't you know?" And she took from her pocket a card,
+carefully wrapped in paper, and pointed to the verse at the head of
+this story. "I meant Him; the one Miss Mason talked about yesterday.
+She said He chose folks now, and gave them things to do for Him; and I
+thought you was one, because you are so pretty, you know, and dress so
+nice; and I wondered what He had given you to do; and I was thinking
+maybe there was something even for me to do in my old dress, and with
+my shoes all out at the toes; but I don't suppose there is."
+
+[Illustration: "I MEANT HIM; THE ONE MISS MASON TALKED ABOUT
+YESTERDAY."]
+
+I wish I could give you a picture of Ethol as she stood looking at the
+ill-dressed girl at that moment. If I could show you a picture of both
+of them, you would see that though side by side there was a very great
+difference between them.
+
+"You are the queerest girl that I ever heard of in my life!" Ethol said
+at last. It was all the answer that she seemed to know how to make.
+
+When three o'clock came, and the two champions took their places on
+the floor of the schoolroom, ready to call their helpers, some of the
+girls were very much astonished to hear Ethol call "Sarah Lambert" for
+her first choice. It seems Ethol had made up her mind that at least the
+"queer girl" should be chosen for something. I don't suppose she had
+the slightest idea what a surprise and delight this was to Sarah; she
+had never been chosen for anything before.
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+                   THE THREE LITTLE M'S.—PART III.
+
+                        BY MARGARET SIDNEY.
+
+THE two little girls stumbled along over the rough ground, crying so
+that they could scarcely see. Mr. Poser stalked on with never a word to
+say. Of course that left Mrs. Smith to do all the talking, which she
+did with a right good will.
+
+At last Martha broke out:
+
+"I know bears have eaten Mary all up, or else snakes, or else
+wild-cats, or—"
+
+"Or she's peeked into a cave, an' the doors rolled to, an' she can't
+get out," suggested Matilda.
+
+At these horrible pictures, they wailed afresh.
+
+"Mr. Poser, I can't go another step," cried Mrs. Smith. "I'm all beat
+out. These young ones have made me so nervous, seems ef I sh'd scream
+myself." With that, she came to a dead stop.
+
+"Set down there," said Mr. Poser, who began to feel as if the rank and
+file of the procession was going to be of very little help to him after
+all.
+
+Mrs. Smith looked around for a convenient resting place. The little
+girls wailed on.
+
+"There's the 'Dungeon,'" she said, pointing to the old gloomy house.
+"They do say folks have moved in there, but it don't look as if a
+livin' soul had ever been nigh it. I remember there's a bench round the
+corn-house. There, I shall rest my bones."
+
+So they all trailed dismally into the overgrown enclosure, and seeing
+nobody, they deposited themselves on a worm-eaten bench that ran around
+two sides of the corn-house. If they had only known what was on the
+other side of that wall!
+
+[Illustration: "ANY OF YOU BEEN IN OUR BARN?"]
+
+A boy came slowly over the rough ground where a long time ago there had
+been a path. He was looking closely at something in his hand, turning
+it over and over in great curiosity. He stopped short in front of the
+bench and its occupants.
+
+"Any of you been in our barn?" he asked abruptly.
+
+"No," said Mr. Poser, "we hain't been in any one's barn."
+
+"Oh well, then, you haven't lost—"
+
+"'Lost?'" cried Mrs. Smith jumping up in great excitement to seize his
+arm. "Oh yes, we have too, every single one of us has lost. That's what
+we've come for."
+
+At that, all four of them gathered around the boy, but he began again
+before they could any of them speak.
+
+"Was the head all punched in?" he demanded, eying them sharply. "And
+were the figures all shaved off?"
+
+"'Head all punched in?' and 'figures all shaved off?' Oh! My senses,"
+exclaimed Mrs. Smith, going back to sit down on her bench again.
+
+"'Cos then tain't yours!" said the boy triumphantly, beginning to move
+off. "An' you don't git this quarter of a dollar away from me 'that'
+way."
+
+"Boy!" commanded old Mr. Poser. His little eyes flashed their sternest,
+as he raised his stick. "Hand that quarter of a dollar to me!"
+
+The boy took one look at the stick and silently put the silver bit into
+the old man's hand.
+
+"I sent that quarter of a dollar five hours ago to you, Mrs. Smith,"
+said Mr. Poser solemnly. "I could swear to it. You see the head o' the
+Goddess of Liberty 'is' punched in, and the figures 'are' shaved off.
+'Now, where is my Mary?'"
+
+It was now the boy's turn to be questioned, as the old man turned
+around on him sternly.
+
+"I haven't seen any Mary," he said, backing off, and wishing he hadn't
+locked the dog in the house.
+
+"Where did you find that quarter?" asked Mr. Poser.
+
+"In the barn," said the boy shortly. "I'd give ten cents to get hold of
+Bose," he muttered under his breath.
+
+"Then we go to the barn," said the old man. "Where that quarter was,
+Mary has been. Lead on!"
+
+The procession was now increased to five, the boy having the honor to
+be captain. The barn was searched in every nook and cranny, but no
+little girl in a red hood rejoiced their anxious, weary eyes.
+
+"We will go all over this place," said Mr. Poser with a very white
+face. "Begin and take us straight through!"
+
+"There ain't any other part of the place been open," said the boy
+doggedly. "Father's away, an' the rest of the folks, an' I've been
+round all day, so I know—'xcept about quarter of an hour," he added
+honestly, "when I run home with Jim Saunders after he'd been here
+shellin' corn with me. But the corn-house is locked. I locked it
+myself; so she 'couldn't' be in there."
+
+"Unlock that corn-house," said Mr. Poser briefly.
+
+And before any one could think twice, the procession stood in front of
+the old door.
+
+The boy grunted something as he rattled the key in the rusty lock; the
+door flew open, to disclose little Mary, huddled up in fright on a big
+bag of potatoes.
+
+"I'm never going to be naughty again."
+
+How often she has said that since. And then she looks and sighs at the
+dim old silver quarter that hangs by a ribbon from her neck.
+
+[Illustration: "I'M NEVER GOING TO BE NAUGHTY AGAIN."]
+
+It has never been off since that night when her father made a hole
+through it and put it in its place. "It's to make you think," he said.
+
+For thoughts:—May none of those who join hands and hearts in the Pansy
+Society for brave battling against their faults, ever look on their
+lovely badges with the sadness with which little Mary sees her old
+silver quarter of a dollar!
+
+                            ————————————
+
+
+
+[Illustration: PANSIES P. S. THOUGHT]
+
+                        PANSIES P. S. THOUGHT.
+
+NOW, all you dear people who "belong," listen to me. I've something to
+tell you about a book:
+
+"Five Little Peppers and How They Grew."
+
+Ever hear of them? Don't go to imagining they were little round black
+things growing in a pod (by the way, I've something funny to tell you
+about that very thing, some day). Never were any nicer and neater and
+better-behaved Peppers, so far as they knew how, than lived in that
+little old kitchen. Five little treasures of a dear mother. Pollie, and
+Ben, and Davie, and Joel, and Phronsie. Really, it is hard to decide
+which of the dear, bright, unselfish Peppers I like the best.
+
+A big book that tells about them all. A book with four hundred and ten
+pages, and a beautiful cover, and ever so many pictures. A book that
+you older brothers and sisters will enjoy, with bits all through it
+that you will delight to read to the little ones. A book that costs a
+good deal of money, of course, for how could people get up a good and
+handsome book full of pictures, unless they spent a good deal of money
+on it?
+
+Besides, it is written by a lady whose writings have to be paid for,
+because she knows how to write, and the publishers know it, and are
+glad to get her to write them a book. Her name, or at least the
+name which she puts on paper, is Margaret Sidney. I'm sure you are
+acquainted with her, for isn't she giving us the account of that
+ridiculous little Mary Posey?
+
+And, now for a secret! Bend your heads! The publishers told me to tell
+you that every boy and girl whose name is on our P. S. roll could have
+a copy of that book for seventy-five cents. Just half what other people
+have to pay.
+
+Now I do hope you'll all get it, and write and tell me what you think
+of Polly's cake, and Phronsie's gingerbread man, and ever so many other
+queer and quaint and sweet things in the story. Another thing: Tell me
+what it was in that family that made such a happy home. Yours lovingly,
+PANSY.
+
+                            ————————————
+
+
+
+                            WHO DID IT?
+
+                            PART THIRD.
+
+IN great haste she flew about for a comb to smooth her disordered
+hair; it would never do to go down to Mrs. Denton with hair all in
+a tousle. She wished that the bright, tin basin which hung over the
+sink, was there, with water in it, for she knew her eyes must be very
+red. Suddenly she stood still in the middle of her little room, her
+hand partly raised to her head, holding the comb. Did somebody speak?
+Whose voice repeated those words which she had learned only the Sabbath
+before:
+
+   "He maketh the storm a calm, so that the waves thereof are still."
+
+What had that to do with her, anyway? Why should it come to her just
+now, and make her feel as though somebody was whispering the words in
+her ear?
+
+No wonder she stood still to think. What a great fierce storm this was
+to beat about poor Hester! The waves were very high and her poor little
+boat had almost struck on the shoals of falsehood. Would it sink? Was
+the Master in the boat with her?
+
+A minute more, then down went the comb, and down went Hester on her
+knees, and was sobbing out her cry before the same Master who calmed
+the storm on Galilee.
+
+   "Oh, dear Jesus," she said, "don't let me do it! Don't let me say
+I inked the dress when I didn't, I 'didn't,' and I don't know anything
+about it! Satan wants me to tell them that I did it, so I can go to
+the party. Oh! 'Don't' let me do it; and make me willing to stay at
+home from that dear party, and don't let the girls believe it, nor Mrs.
+Neilson, when they hear the wicked, 'wicked' story; I don't see how
+they can help believing it, but please don't let them, for Jesus' sake.
+Amen."
+
+Meantime, down in the parlor the young ladies were entertaining New
+Year's caller's, and, between times, talking about Hester and her
+naughtiness.
+
+"I didn't think the child was untruthful," said Cora, "I always knew
+she was a spunky little piece, but I must say I am surprised at her
+telling so many falsehoods, and insisting on them in the way she has."
+
+"So am I," said Mrs. Denton. "If there were any other possible way of
+accounting for it, I should think the child really didn't know how it
+happened; she is so persistent in her words!"
+
+Then all three ladies agreed that of course she must have done it;
+there was simply no other way of accounting for it.
+
+"There is that game, Cora," said Miss Emeline, in one of the pauses,
+"spread over the table yet, just as you had it last night."
+
+"I know it," said Miss Cora. "I hadn't energy enough to put it away;
+stupid thing! I never did get so weary of anything as I was of that
+last night; I believe I will hide those cards. I think Author's Game is
+very dull anyway."
+
+And she sauntered toward the little table where the cards were strewn
+in confusion, and taking a seat began slowly to gather them up, reading
+lines from one and another, and talking about them with her sister.
+When she arose, there were plainly to be seen on her handsome new suit
+of bottle-green, large bright drops of the same ink that had ruined
+her blue silk. Just imagine the exclamations, and the dismay, and the
+rushing for water and sponge to try to repair the mischief, and the
+sudden jerking open of the drawer of that little card-table, which act
+brought to view a small phial of ink lying on its side; from the puddle
+in the drawer, drops were slowly oozing, dropping now on the carpet.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"Whew!" This was the exclamation of Mrs. Denton's son Willis, who had
+just banged the hall door, and rushed into the parlor, stopping in
+astonishment over the sight before him.
+
+"That's me, to a dot," he said frankly, as he took in the picture.
+"Mother, if you are looking about for the fellow to punish, here he is.
+I was teasing that dumpling of a Hester, last night, and I ran away
+with the ink she was using, and set it in this drawer. As to who turned
+it upside down, I don't know. I'm sure I set it in all right. Is the
+dress spoiled, Cora? I'm awful sorry."
+
+I think you will almost forgive Cora for her tears and sharp words of
+the night before, when I tell you that the first words she said, were:
+"That poor child up-stairs! Mamma, is it too late for her to go?"
+Considering the fact that this was the second pretty dress spoiled by
+the ink, I think Cora did very well.
+
+"I hope not;" said Mrs. Denton, looking at the little clock on the
+mantel, and laying down the sponge.
+
+"Who would have imagined that the dress could have been inked in any
+other way!"
+
+"What's all that?" Willis asked, but his mother had gone up-stairs.
+
+Poor little Hester! She was on her knees again; this time her prayer
+could be plainly heard through the thin partition.
+
+   "Oh, dear Jesus, if you only would make a way for them to find out it
+wasn't me, and let me go to the party! I don't see how you can do it,
+but the verse said: 'Be not afraid, only believe;' and I know you can
+do anything, and if you only would please to; I can't think of a way
+for them to find out, but I know you could make a way."
+
+Just at that moment Mrs. Denton pushed open the door.
+
+"We have found out, Hester," she said, trying to speak in her natural
+tone. "You had nothing to do with inking the dress; we are very sorry
+that you have had such an unhappy time, and glad to find that you told
+the truth; now, if you hurry as fast as you can, I think there will be
+time for you to get to the party."
+
+"Mamma," sounded Cora's voice as she came up the stairs, "Mrs. Neilson
+has sent her carriage; the driver said it was such a long walk from
+here, she told him to call on his way back, and he will wait for
+Hester; let me help her."
+
+How fast the nimble fingers flew over Hester's hair, tying it with some
+bright ribbons of Miss Cora's own! The dress and shoes were buttoned,
+and coat and hood hurried on almost as fast as I can tell the story,
+and still in such bewilderment that she hardly understood who she
+was, Hester flew down-stairs and was seated in Mrs. Neilson's elegant
+carriage, tucked in like a lady among gay robes.
+
+"And how did they find out their mistake, dear?"
+
+Mrs. Neilson asked the question very gently as she stooped and kissed
+Hester's check. She was very fond of Hester, and her eyes had been
+full of tears while the sad little story of trouble and temptation and
+victory had been told her by Hester's own lips, for the child decided
+that she would like to have Mrs. Neilson know what made her so very
+late. So she had lingered to talk, while the others played.
+
+[Illustration: WILLIS STOPPED IN ASTONISHMENT.]
+
+"I don't know, ma'am," said Hester, after a minute's thought, during
+which time she remembered that no one had explained that to her. "I
+don't know, ma'am, unless God told them. I don't see how anybody else
+could."
+
+                            ————————————
+
+
+
+[Illustration: SIDE BY SIDE]
+
+                           SIDE BY SIDE.
+
+[PART III.]
+
+   HE MAKETH THE STORM A CALM, SO THAT THE WAVES THEREOF ARE STILL.
+
+   FOR THIS PURPOSE THE SON OF GOD WAS MANIFESTED, THAT HE MIGHT DESTROY
+THE WORKS OF THE DEVIL.
+
+   BE NOT AFRAID, ONLY BELIEVE.
+
+   HE HATH SENT ME TO BIND UP THE BROKEN-HEARTED, TO PROCLAIM LIBERTY TO
+THE CAPTIVES.
+
+
+"SHE doesn't know what she is saying," said Mrs. Harrison, and she
+turned away with a sigh that came from her very heart. On the bed lay
+Ethol, all her beautiful curls cut off, her face purple with fever, and
+her eyes unnaturally bright.
+
+"Yes, I do know, mamma, and I want her very much; she is in our class
+in Sunday-school, and I want to ask something. Send for her, mamma,
+right away."
+
+"But my darling child, the doctor said you must be kept very still, and
+see no one, and try to sleep."
+
+"I have tried, mamma, with all my might; it seems to me as though I had
+tried for a hundred years, and every minute I am wider awake. I want to
+see Sarah—Sarah Lambert."
+
+You have discovered before this that Ethol was sick; so sick that
+Doctor Everett, with a very grave face, had told her father and mother
+only that morning, that he feared she could not get well.
+
+"You see," he said, "it would really be better if she were quite out of
+her head. As it is, she is just delirious enough to have vague ideas
+of what is going on, and to be troubled, and she gets no rest day
+nor night. But we will do all we can. Don't let her be worried about
+anything, and don't let any one see her; and try all you can to get her
+to sleep."
+
+And here she was, an hour afterwards, insisting on having Sarah Lambert
+sent for! Her mother did not know what to do. She only knew Sarah as a
+little girl who wore the same ugly calico to school day after day, and
+very ragged shoes, and lived over Mr. Dunlap's stable. So much she had
+heard from Ethol. The very fact that Ethol wanted to see her, showed
+that she did not know what she was about.
+
+Now, what was the mother to do? Here were the doctor's orders: "Don't
+let her see anybody," and "Don't let her be worried about anything."
+One of them must be disobeyed; they ran across each other. It ended in
+a message being sent to school building No. 34 for Sarah Lambert to
+call at Mr. Harrison's at once.
+
+[Illustration: "HE MAKETH THE STORM."]
+
+Then Ethol frightened her mother still more by urging that she be left
+quite alone with Sarah. She was so eager, and her fever rose so much
+higher while she urged, that Mrs. Harrison gave frightened consent, and
+then went out and cried, to think of what she had done.
+
+"Little girl," she said to Sarah, "do you know she is very, very sick,
+and there is great danger that you will make her worse? You must come
+away just as soon as she will let you, and don't talk to her any more
+than you can help, and don't for anything in the world, let her know
+how sick she is."
+
+Then Sarah went into the pretty room, and the first words that Ethol
+said to her were:
+
+"Do they think I am going to die?"
+
+Now the truth was that Sarah Lambert had learned to do one thing well,
+and that was, to speak the truth: she always gave strictly honest
+answers in school; some of the girls laughed at her, but everybody
+believed her. A memory of this may have been running through Ethol's
+sick little brain, when she insisted on having her sent for.
+
+"I guess they think so," said Sarah, gravely, "but I don't."
+
+There was something so quietly earnest in this answer, that Ethol could
+not help thinking about the last, instead of the first.
+
+"Why don't you?" she asked.
+
+"Because I've been telling Him all about you; he can cure you so
+easy—just like he did the little girl. She was twelve years old. They
+laughed at him because he said she was only asleep; she was dead, you
+know, but he waked her up. He can cure people after they are dead, and
+of course he can before; and I told him about you, just as her father
+did about her, and asked him to come and lay his hand on you, and he
+said to me 'Be not afraid, only believe.' So now I do believe."
+
+"I don't understand you," said Ethol, her eyes seeming to grow larger;
+"you are talking about Jesus, I know, but how 'could' he say that to
+you?"
+
+"Whispered it; just like his ear was close down to mine. I heard him; I
+often hear him; he's chosen me, you know. Don't you remember that time
+I asked you if you was chosen?"
+
+"Yes," said Ethol, gravely, "I remember. But I'm not a chosen one."
+
+"I guess you are. I've asked him about you lots of times. He wants you
+to belong, and he's going to make you well, so you can. You must 'Be
+not afraid, only believe.'"
+
+"Believe what?" said Ethol.
+
+"Everything he says. I learn new things all the time. I didn't know
+much of anything about him when I went to the Sunday-school; you got me
+to go, you know. I told him that, too. There! I forgot I wasn't to talk
+to you; you are to go to sleep."
+
+"I can't go to sleep," said Ethol; "I've tried for days and days, and I
+know mamma thinks I am going to die; and oh, Sarah, I'm afraid to die!"
+
+"You must 'Be not afraid, only believe,'" said Sarah again. "That is
+what he said to his disciples when he was on his way to cure the sick
+girl; that is what he said to me. He is on his way to cure you now, and
+I guess he wants you to sleep so he can. Look here, shut your eyes, and
+I'll tell you the words on my card, over and over, and when I have said
+them ten times, you must be asleep."
+
+What strange power had the grave little voice over Ethol's throbbing
+veins? She began in a low, steady tone:
+
+   "'He maketh the storm a calm, so that the waves thereof are still.'
+   'For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy
+        the works of the devil.'
+   'Be not afraid, only believe.'
+   'He hath sent me to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty
+        to the captive.'"
+
+Then, without the slightest pause, the low steady voice began again:
+
+   "'He maketh the storm a calm—'"
+
+Mrs. Harrison had promised her little daughter that she should not be
+interrupted while talking with Sarah Lambert, but at last the poor
+mother grew so frightened over the stillness, that she opened the door.
+
+But Sarah shook her head, and put her finger on her lip, and went on in
+the same low tone:
+
+   "'He maketh the storm a calm—'"
+
+And Ethol was asleep.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 76069 ***