was regarding me
critically. Everywhere the weeds were rampant. Everywhere there were
signs of a feeble battle against them, bare spots where the Professor
had charged, cut his way into their massed ranks, only to retreat
wearied and beaten by their numbers.

Over this wretchedness the girl waved her hand and said: "Here is our
farm." The blue ribbon in her hair bobbed majestically as she pointed
across the stretch of weeds to the cabin. "And yonder is our house."
She pinched my arm as a sign of caution. "And there is father," she
added in a voice of muffled pride. "He's studying. Father's always
studying."

She would have led me on in silence, not to disturb his labors with
either mind or hoe, but he looked down and asked in a tone of yawning
interest: "Who's the lad, Penelope?"

"I don't know," she answered. "He fell into the creek, and I pulled
him out. I've brought him in to warm him up."

Wet, shivering boys emerging suddenly from the woods might have been a
common sight about the Professor's home, did one judge from the way he
received his daughter's explanation. He merely nodded and fell upon
the weeds with newly acquired vigor. As we walked on we heard the
spasmodic crunching of his hoe. But the noise stopped before we
reached the house door, and the silence caused us to turn. He was
standing erect looking at us.

"I think you'd better have something, lad," he cried, and, dropping the
hoe, he hurried after us.

So it came that the Professor did me the honors of his home, and with
such kindness that all my fear of him was soon gone. He stirred the
fire to a roaring blaze and placed me in front of it. He spread my
coat before the stove and drew my boots, and quickly my clothes began
to steam, and I was as uncomfortably warm as before I had been
uncomfortably cold. The shy politeness of my age forbade my protesting
against this over-indulgence in heat, and not until the Professor
declared that he must give me a dose to ward off sickness did I raise a
feeble voice in remonstrance.

My protest was in vain. From the cupboard he brought a large black
bottle. Had I seen my mother approaching me with a bottle as ominous
as that, even her favorite remedy that I knew so well, the Seven Seals
of Health and Happiness, I should have fled far away, but now the girl
had my coat, and was turning it before the fire, while her father stood
between me and my boots. He smiled so benignly that had he offe