to eat."

"No, you won't," exclaimed the woman sharply. "Much he cares! Says he
pays me too much now for cooking; and he says I've got money tucked away
here. Wish I had."

"So do I," said the child. "I'd buy the biggest doll you ever saw."

"Fudge!" cried the old woman. "Why, you've outgrown 'em long ago."

"I know it," said the child, solemnly. "But I'd just like to have a big
one, once."

"And so you should, if we had our rights," cried Grannie Thornton,
lifting herself up on an elbow, with a jerk that brought forth an
exclamation of pain. "If he didn't own everything. If he didn't get it
all--what we used to own."

"Old Ellison?" suggested the child.

"Yes, Jim Ellison." Grannie Thornton sat up and shook a lean fist toward
the window that opened off toward the hill. "Oh, he bought it all right.
He paid for it, I suppose. But it's ours, by rights. We owned it all
once, from Ten Mile Wood to the bridge. But it's gone now."

"I don't see why we don't own it now, if that's so," said the child.

"Well, it's law doin's," muttered the woman. "Get your own supper, and
don't bother me."

"I don't understand," said the child, as she went back to the kitchen.

She might have understood better if Grannie Thornton had explained the
real reason: that the Thorntons had gone wild and run through their farm
property; mortgaged it and sold it out; and that Ellison, a shrewd
buyer, had got it when it was to be had cheapest. But she asked one more
question.

"Gran'" she said, peeping in at the door, "will we ever get it again,
s'pose?"

"Mercy sakes, how do I know!" came the answer. "It's ours now, by
rights. Will you ever stop talking?"

The child looked wonderingly out across the fields; seated herself by
the window, and still gazed as she drank her coffee and ate her scanty
supper. She was sitting there when night shut down and hid the hill and
the brook from sight.

The sun, himself an early riser, was up not anywhere near so early next
morning as was Bess Thornton. There was light in the east, but the sun
had not begun to roll above the hill-tops when the child stole quietly
out of bed, slipped into her few garments, and hurried barefoot, from
the room where she and Grannie Thornton slept. The old woman was still
slumbering heavily.

"I'll not ask that old Witham for anything for gran," she said. "I'll
get her something,--and something she'll like, too. It all belongs to
us, anyway, gran' said."

The girl g