and ain't 'fraid
o' _hard work_, well and good; but if he goes 'cause he's quarrelled
with his bread and butter, all along o' stuffin' his head with dime
novels and sich like rubbish, I guess he'll end where you began--in the
coal-hole. Now don't you forget them words o' mine." And Frank never
did.

THE END.

SETTING THE BROOK TO WORK.

BY WILLIAM O. STODDARD.

The brook had never done a stroke of work in its life. So long, at
least, as Mart Benson could remember, it had gurgled across the foot of
his father's garden, tumbling heels over head down the little fall in
the middle, as if it knew it had got into some place that didn't belong
to it, and was in a desperate hurry to get out.

Then it made a dive under the fence, into Squire Spencer's orchard, and
then under another fence, and through a low stone archway across the
river road.

That was the end of the brook, for the river let it right in without so
much as saying, "How do you do?"

"It isn't more'n two feet across anywhere," said Mart to himself. "It
isn't so much as that just above the fall, and it's a foot and a half
below the top of the bank. I could make a dam there, and a flume."

Mart was a great whittler.

Mr. Jellicombe, the carpenter, used to say of him that when he wasn't
whittling, it was because he had had to stop to sharpen his knife.

"Well," said Mart, in reply to that, "what's the fun of whittling with a
dull knife? If you want a knife to cut straight and smooth, you've got
to have an edge on it."

So there was always a pretty good edge on his, and it was curious what
things he managed to carve out with it.

He had made a wooden chain out of a long square stick that Mr.
Jellicombe brought to the house to mend a door frame with. He had made
kites, walking-sticks, bats, wooden spoons and forks, a little wagon,
and any number of other things, of which about all that could be said
was that they gave him plenty of good whittling.

But Mart had been to the mill the day before, and had waited there two
hours while his father was having a grist of corn ground. All those two
hours had been spent by Mart with a shingle in one hand and his knife in
the other, but at the end of them there was hardly a notch in the
shingle, and Mart shut up his knife, and put it back in his pocket.

He had been watching the great water-wheel and the flume that brought
the water to it from the pond. He had studied the dam, too, and had been
thinking