her head and slammed the door.

"That's lucky now," soliloquized Tode; "because he _does_ live most
everywhere, and I don't want to see him just about now--fact is, it
would never do to have them nine babies tumbling into my coffee and
getting scalded."

He trudged back to a little weather-worn, tumble-down building on the
other side of his new enterprise, and knocked. Such a dear little old
fat woman in a bright calico dress, and with a wide white frill to her
cap, answered his knock. He chuckled inwardly, and said at once: "I
guess you're the woman what's going to let me boil my coffee on your
stove, and warm a pie now and then, ain't you?"

"Whatever is the lad talking about?" asked the bewildered old lady.

"Why--" said Tode, conscious that he had made a very unbusiness-like
opening, and he begun at the beginning, and told her his story.

"Well now, I never!" said the woman, sinking into a chair. "No, I never
did in all my life! And so you left that there place, because you wasn't
going to give bottles to your neighbors no longer, and now you're going
into business for yourself? Well, well, the land knows I wish there
wasn't no bottles to put to 'em--and then they wouldn't be put, you
know; and if there's anything I _do_ pray for with all my might and
main, next to prayin' that my two boys would let the bottles
alone--which I'm afraid they don't, and more's the pity--it's that the
bottles will all get clean smashed up one of these days, in His own good
time you know."

Tode turned upon her an eager, questioning look.

"Who do you pray to?" he asked, abruptly.

"Why, bless the boy! I ain't a heathen, you know, to bow down to wood
and stone, the work of men's hands, and them things as it were. I pray
to the dear Lord that made me, and died for me too, and, for the matter
of that, lives for me all the time."

A bright color glowed in Tode's cheek, and a bright fire sparkled in his
eye.

"I know him," he said, briefly and earnestly.

"Now, do you, though?" said the little old lady, as eager and earnest as
himself, "and do you pray to him?"

Tode gravely bowed his head.

"Then I'll let you have my stove and my coffee-pot, and my oven, and
welcome, and I'll look after the coffee and the pies now and then
myself. I'll give you a lift as sure as I have a coffee-pot to lend.
Like enough you're one of the Lord's own, and have been sent right
straight here for me to give a cup of cold water to, you know, or to