l be
quite as much as the first letter from the lawyer led us to expect. Some
of your dearest wishes, my dear, may be realized in time."

"Oh! I can go to Lakeview Hall with Bess, after all!" cried Nan, aloud,
at this point.

Indeed, that possibility quite filled the girl's mind for a while.
Nothing else in Papa Sherwood's letter, aside from the good news of
Momsey's improved health, so pleased her as this thought. She hastened
to write a long letter to Bess Harley, with Lakeview Hall as the text.

Summer seemed to stride out of the forest now, full panoplied. After the
frost and snow of her early days at Pine Camp, Nan had not expected
such heat. The pools beside the road steamed. The forest was atune from
daybreak to midnight with winged denizens, for insect and bird life
seemed unquenchable in the Big Woods.

Especially was this true of the tamarack swamp. It was dreadfully hot
at noontide on the corduroy road which passed Toby Vanderwiller's little
farm; but often Nan Sherwood went that way in the afternoon. Mr. Mangel,
the school principal, had written Nan and encouraged her to send a full
description of some of Corson Vanderwiller's collection, especially of
the wonderful death's-head moth, to a wealthy collector in Chicago. Nan
did this at once.

So, one day, a letter came from the man and in it was a check for
twenty-five dollars.

"This is a retainer," the gentleman wrote. "I am much interested in your
account of the lame boy's specimens. I want the strangely marked moth
in any case, and the check pays for an option on it until I can come and
see his specimens personally."

Nan went that very afternoon to the tamarack swamp to tell the
Vanderwillers this news and give Toby the check. She knew poor Corson
would be delighted, for now he could purchase the longed-for silk dress
for his grandmother.

The day was so hot and the way so long that Nan was glad to sit down
when she reached the edge of the sawdust strip, to rest and cool off
before attempting this unshaded desert. A cardinal bird--one of the
sauciest and most brilliant of his saucy and brilliant race, flitted
about her as she sat upon a log.

"You pretty thing!" crooned Nan. "If it were not wicked I'd wish to have
you at home in a cage. I wish--"

She stopped, for in following the flight of the cardinal her gaze
fastened upon a most surprising thing off at some distance from the
sawdust road. A single dead tree, some forty feet in height and