ttle school-house, a swarm of midgets in pink
dresses, pink sun-bonnets, and brown legs, came rushing to meet their
teacher, with that peculiar devotion the children in the country develop
for a refined teacher.

Radbourn helped Lily out into the midst of the eager little scholars,
who swarmed upon her like bees on a lump of sugar, till even Radbourn's
gravity gave way, and he smiled into her lifted eyes--an unusual smile,
that strangely enough stopped the smile on her own lips, filling her
face with a wistful shadow, and her breath came hard for a moment, and
she trembled.

She loved that cold, stern face, oh, so much! and to have him smile was
a pleasure that made her heart leap till she suffered a smothering pain.
She turned to him to say:

"I am very thankful, Mr. Radbourn, for another pleasant ride," adding in
a lower tone: "It was a very great pleasure; you always give me so much.
I feel stronger and more hopeful."

"I'm glad you feel so. I was afraid I was prosy with my land-doctrine."

"Oh, no! Indeed no! You have given me a new hope; I am exalted with the
thought; I shall try to think it all out and apply it."

And so they parted, the children looking on and slyly whispering among
themselves. Radbourn looked back after awhile, but the bare little hive
had absorbed its little group, and was standing bleak as a tombstone and
hot as a furnace on the naked plain in the blazing sun.

"America's pitiful boast!" said the young radical, looking back at it.
"Only a miserable hint of what it might be."

All that forenoon, as Lily faced her little group of barefooted
children, she was thinking of Radbourn, of his almost fierce sympathy
for these poor, supine farmers, hopeless and in some cases content in
their narrow lives. The children almost worshiped the beautiful girl
who came to them as a revelation of exquisite neatness and taste,--whose
very voice and intonation awed them.

They noted, unconsciously, of course, every detail. Snowy linen, touches
of soft color, graceful lines of bust and side--the slender fingers that
could almost speak, so beautifully flexile were they. Lily herself
sometimes, when she shook the calloused, knotted, stiffened hands of the
women, shuddered with sympathetic pain, to think that the crowning
wonder and beauty of God's world should be so maimed and distorted from
its true purpose.

Even in the children before her she could see the inherited results of
fruitless labor--and, mo