as as happy as it could be.
Then he began to laugh very heartily, and I laughed too, till the tears
were in our eyes.

"Of--of course it was, Nat," he cried, chuckling and coughing together.
"We couldn't do what all the king's horses and all the king's men didn't
manage, Nat, and--yes, my dear, we're coming."

Uncle Joe jumped up and went out of the tool-house, for my aunt's voice
could be heard telling us to come in.

"Hush!" he whispered, with a finger on his lips. "Make haste in, Nat,
and run up to your room and wash your hands."

I followed him in, and somehow, whenever Doctor Burnett was in the room,
my aunt did not seem so cross, especially as her brother took a good
deal of notice of me, and kept on asking me questions.

I soon found, to my great delight, that he was going to stay with us
till he started for Singapore, a place whose name somehow set me
thinking about Chinese people and Indian rajahs, but that was all; the
rest was to me one great mystery, and I used to lie in bed of a night
and wonder what sort of a place it could be.

Every day our visitor grew less cool and distant in his ways, and at
last my aunt said pettishly:

"Well, really, Richard, it is too bad; this is the third morning this
week you have kept that boy away from school by saying you wanted him.
How do you expect his education to get on?"

"Get on?" said Doctor Burnett; "why, my dear sister, he is learning the
whole time he is with me; I'll be bound to say that he has picked up
more geography since he has been with me than he has all the time he has
been to school."

"I don't know so much about that," said my aunt snappishly.

"Then I do," he said. "Let the boy alone, he is learning a great deal;
and I shall want him more this next week."

"You'd better take him away from school altogether," said my aunt
angrily.

"Well, yes," said the doctor quietly; "as it is so near his holidays, he
may as well stop away the rest of this half."

"Richard!" cried my aunt as I sat there pinching my legs to keep from
looking pleased.

"He will have to work hard at helping me with my collections, which are
on the way here, I find, from a letter received this morning. There
will be a great deal of copying and labelling, and that will improve his
writing, though he does write a fair round hand."

"But it will be neglecting his other studies," cried my aunt.

"But then he will be picking up a good deal of Latin, for I shall
explain to