iments of the Pilgrim Father," was
pencilled on the engraved card stuck under the string.

There was layer after layer of chocolate creams and caramels,
marshmallows and candied violets, burnt almonds and nougat, besides a
score of other things--specimens of the confectioner's art for which she
knew no name. She had seen the outside of such boxes in the show-cases
in Phoenix, but never before had such a tempting display met her eyes
as these delicious sweets in their trimmings of lace paper and tinfoil
and ribbons, crowned by a pair of little gilt tongs, with which one
might make dainty choice.

Betty's gift was not so sightly. It looked like an old dried sponge, for
it was only a ball of matted roots. But she held it up with an
exclamation of pleasure. "Oh, it is one of those fern-balls we were
talking about this morning! I've been wanting one all year. You see,"
she explained to Mary, when she had finished thanking Doctor Bradford,
"you hang it up in a window and keep it wet, and it turns into a perfect
little hanging garden, so fine and green and feathery it's fit for
fairy-land. It will grow as long as you remember to water it. Gay
Melville had one last year in her window at school, and I envied her
every time I saw it."

"Now what does that make me think of?" said Mary, screwing up her
forehead into a network of wrinkles and squinting her eyes half-shut in
her effort to remember. "Oh, I know! It's something I read in a paper a
few days ago. It's in China or Japan, I don't know which, but in one of
those heathen countries. When a young man wants to find out if a girl
really likes him, he goes to her house early in the dawn, and leaves a
growing plant on the balcony for her. If she spurns him, she tears it up
by the roots and throws it out in the street to wither, and I believe
breaks the pot; but if she likes him, she takes it in and keeps it
green, to show that he lives in her memory."

A shout of laughter from Rob and Phil had made her turn to stare at them
uneasily. "What are you laughing at?" she asked, innocently. "I _did_
read it. I can show you the paper it is in, and I thought it was a right
bright way for a person to find out what he wanted to know without
asking."

It was very evident that she hadn't the remotest idea she had said
anything personal, and her ignorance of the cause of their mirth made
her speech all the funnier. Doctor Bradford laughed, too, as he said
with a formal bow: "I hope you wi