ils, with her little
dilapidated comb. When she brought out the contents of the bird-cage
and opened it in search of her night-dress, the orange rolled out,
almost frightening her. The purse, too, rattled on the bare floor as it
fell.

She picked it up, and by going close to the fly-specked window she
counted the ten ten-cent pieces, a whole dollar. Never was a little
girl more happy.

"It was Camilla," she whispered to herself. "Oh, I love Camilla! and I
never said 'God bless Camilla,'"--with a sudden pang of remorse.

She was on her knees in a moment and added the postscript.

"I can send the orange home to ma, and she can put the skins in the
chist to make the things smell nice, and I'll git that windy open
to-morrow."

Clasping her little purse in her hand, and with the orange close beside
her head, she lay down to sleep. The smell of the orange made her
forget the heavy air in the room.

"Anyway," she murmured contentedly, "the Lord is attendin' to all that."

Pearl slept the heavy sleep of healthy childhood and woke in the gray
dawn before anyone else in the household was stirring. She threw on
some clothing and went down the ladder into the kitchen. She started
the fire, secured the basin full of water and a piece of yellow soap
and came back to her room for her "oliver."

"I can't lave it all to the Lord to do," she said, as she rubbed the
soap on her little wash-rag. "It doesn't do to impose on good nature."

When Tom, the only son of the Motherwells, came down to light the fire,
he found Pearl setting the table, the kitchen swept and the kettle
boiling.

Pearl looked at him with her friendly Irish smile, which he returned
awkwardly.

He was a tall, stoop-shouldered, rather good-looking lad of twenty. He
had heavy gray eyes, and a drooping mouth.

Tom had gone to school a few winters when there was not much doing, but
his father thought it was a great deal better for a boy to learn to
handle horses and "sample wheat," and run a binder, than learn the
"pack of nonsense they got in school nowadays," and when the pretty
little teacher from the eastern township came to Southfield school,
Mrs. Motherwell knew at one glance that Tom would learn no good from
her--she was such a flighty looking thing! Flowers on the under side of
her hat!

So poor Tom grew up a clod of the valley. Yet Mrs. Motherwell would
tell you, "Our Tom'll be the richest man in these parts. He'll get
every cent we have and all th