on his tangled curls.

"I ain't cryin', I ain't cryin' a bit. You leave me alone," Pearl
blubbered rudely, shaking off Mrs Francis's shapely hand.

Mrs. Francis was shocked. What in the world was making Pearl cry?

The next morning Mrs. Francis took out her little red book to enter the
result of her experiment, and sat looking long and earnestly at its
pages. Then she drew a writing pad toward her and wrote an illuminative
article on "Late Hours a Frequent and Fruitful Cause of Irritability in
Children."

CHAPTER VII

"ONE OF MANITOBA'S PROSPEROUS FARMERS"

Mr. Samuel Motherwell was a wealthy farmer who lived a few miles from
Millford. Photographs of Mr. Motherwell's premises may be seen in the
agricultural journals, machinery catalogues, advertisements for woven
wire, etc.--"the home of one of Manitoba's prosperous farmers."

The farm buildings were in good repair; a large red barn with white
trimmings surmounted by a creaking windmill; a long, low machine shed
filled with binders, seeders, disc-harrows--everything that is needed
for the seed-time and harvest and all that lies between; a large stone
house, square and gray, lonely and bare, without a tree or a shrub
around it. Mr. Motherwell did not like vines or trees around a house.
They were apt to attract lightning and bring vermin.

Potatoes grew from the road to the house; and around the front door, as
high as the veranda, weeds flourished in abundance, undisturbed and
unnoticed.

Behind the cookhouse a bed of poppies flamed scarlet against the
general sombreness, and gave a strange touch of colour to the common
grayness. They seemed out of place in the busy farmyard. Everything
else was there for use. Everybody hurried but the poppies; idlers of
precious time, suggestive of slothful sleep, they held up their brazen
faces in careless indifference.

Sam had not planted them--you may be sure of that. Mrs. Motherwell
would tell you of an English girl she had had to work for her that
summer who had brought the seed with her from England, and of how one
day when she sent the girl to weed the onions, she had found her
blubbering and crying over what looked to Mrs. Motherwell nothing more
than weeds. The girl then told her she had brought the seed with her
and planted it there. She was the craziest thing, this Polly Bragg. She
went every night to see them because they were like a "bit of home,"
she said. Mrs. Motherwell would tell you just what a ridicul