inally went to sleep with his head
against the consul's knee. He was a "lappy" man, Nancy said next
morning; and indeed there had been no one like him in the family circle
for many a long month. He was tender, he was gay, he was fatherly, he
was interested in all that concerned them; so no wonder that he heard
all about Gilbert's plans for earning money, and Nancy's accepted story.
No wonder he exclaimed at the check for ten dollars proudly exhibited in
payment, and no wonder he marvelled at the Summer Vacation School in the
barn, where fourteen little scholars were already enrolled under the
tutelage of the Carey Faculty. "I never wanted to go to anything in my
life as much as I want to go to that school!" he asserted. "If I could
write a circular as enticing as that, I should be a rich man. I wish
you'd let me have some new ones printed, girls, and put me down for
three evening lectures; I'd do almost anything to get into that
Faculty." "I wish you'd give the lectures for the benefit of the
Faculty, that would be better still," said Kitty. "Nancy's coming-out
party was to be in the barn this summer; that's one of the things we're
earning money for; or at least we make believe that it is, because it's
so much more fun to work for a party than for coal or flour or meat!"

A look from Mrs. Carey prevented the children from making any further
allusions to economy, and Gilbert skillfully turned the subject by
giving a dramatic description of the rise and fall of The Dirty Boy,
from its first appearance at his mother's wedding breakfast to its last,
at the house-warming supper.

After Lemuel Hamilton had gone back to the little country hotel he sat
by the open window for another hour, watching the moonbeams shimmering
on the river and bathing the tip of the white meeting-house steeple in a
flood of light. The air was still and the fireflies were rising above
the thick grass and carrying their fairy lamps into the lower branches
of the feathery elms. "Haying" would begin next morning, and he would be
wakened by the sharpening of scythes and the click of mowing machines.
He would like to work in the Hamilton fields, he thought, knee-deep in
daisies,--fields on whose grass he had not stepped since he was a boy
just big enough to _go_ behind the cart and "rake after." What an
evening it had been! None of them had known it, but as a matter of fact
they had all scaled Shiny Wall and had been sitting with Mother Carey in
Peacepoo