lle. "Mother lets us help her."

Maurice added, "It is reciprocity, Miss Celia."

Celia's ill temper wavered and went down before the row of bright faces.
"Well, perhaps you may help if you really want to, but it is tiresome
work."

They did not seem to find it so, as they sat around the table on the
porch, carefully done up in checked aprons, three of them at work on the
raspberries, and two helping Celia with the currants.

Each wore a fresh oak leaf, and nothing would do but Rosalind must run
back to get one for Miss Celia; and there must have been magic in it, so
suddenly did Celia's courage revive.

"I feel better," she said, stopping to turn the leaves of the cook-book.
"Let me see,--'boil several hours till the juice is well out of the
fruit,'--Sally always lets it drip over night into the big stone jar. I
shall have these currants out of the way by dinner-time. You are really a
great help. I wish there was something I could do for you."

"Tell us a story, Miss Celia," Belle suggested promptly.

"I don't know any."

"Something about when you were a little girl," said Katherine.

Celia hesitated. "The only story I know is about a magician and a tiger,
Rosalind's calling Morgan 'the magician' reminded me of it."

"I love magicians and tigers," Rosalind remarked. "Do you remember the
picture I told you about, Maurice? Do tell it to us, Miss Celia."

Celia wondered afterward how she could have done it, but now she thought
of nothing but her desire to please the children, so she began:--

"Once there was a little girl who loved fairy tales and believed with all
her heart in fairies, magicians, and ogres. In the town where she had
recently come to live she had a playmate, a boy, who laughed at her for
thinking there were such creatures in the world, and the two often argued
the matter.

"One day this little girl was sitting on the fence looking up at the sky
and wishing something would happen, when she heard the boy calling her.
She answered, and he came running across the grass and climbed up beside
her, and with an air of great mystery told her he knew a secret. Of course
the little girl was anxious to hear it, and of course the boy tried to
tease her by refusing to tell. But by and by he could keep it no longer,
and in tones of awe he whispered that he knew a magician who lived in
their very town.

"The little girl clapped her hands; for if her playmate believed in
magicians, he must surely come to b