en cents' worf o'
oberseein' aint a-gwine to hurt nobody."

"Well, Uncle Braddock," said Harry, laughing, "I think you're wise to
give it up."

"Dat's so," said the old negro, and away he trudged to Aunt Matilda's
cabin, where, no doubt, he ate a very good ten cents' worth of corn-meal
and bacon.

This wood enterprise of Harry's worked pretty well on the whole.
Sometimes the men cut and hauled quite steadily, and sometimes they did
not. Once every two weeks Harry rode over to the station, and collected
what was due him; and his share of the profits kept Aunt Matilda quite
comfortably.

But, although Kate was debarred from any share in this business, she
worked every day at her tidies for the store, and knit stockings,
besides, for some of the neighbors, who furnished the yarn and paid her
a fair price. There were people who thought Mrs. Loudon did wrong in
allowing her daughter to work for money in this way, but Kate's mother
said that the end justified the work, and that so long as Kate
persevered in her self-appointed tasks, she should not interfere.

As for Kate, she said she should work on, no matter how much money Harry
made. There was no knowing what might happen.

But the most important of Kate's duties was the personal attention she
paid to Aunt Matilda. She went over to the old woman's cabin every day
or two, and saw that she was kept warm and had what she needed.

And these visits had a good influence on the old woman, for her cabin
soon began to look much neater, now that a nice little girl came to see
her so often.

When the spring came on, Aunt Matilda actually took it into her head to
whitewash her cabin, a thing she had not done for years. She and Uncle
Braddock worked at it by turns. The old woman was too stiff and
rheumatic to keep at such work long at a time; but she was very proud of
her whitewashing; and when she was tired of working at the inside of her
cabin, she used to go out and whitewash the trunks of the trees around
the house. She had seen trees thus ornamented, and she thought they were
perfectly beautiful.

Kate was violently opposed to anything of this kind, and, at last, told
Aunt Matilda that if she persisted in surrounding her house with what
looked like a forest of tombstones, she, Kate, would have to stop coming
there.

So Aunt Matilda, in a manner, desisted.

But one day she noticed a little birch-tree, some distance from the
house, and the inclination to whitewash tha