embroidered linens.

Hannah let us in. She looked surly and had a bandage round her head, a
sure sign of trouble--Hannah always referring a pain in her temper to
her ear or her head or her teeth. She clutched my arm in the hall and
held me back.

"I'm going to poison him!" she said. "Miss Lizzie, that little snake
goes or I go!"

"I'm ashamed of you, Hannah!" I replied sternly. "If out of the breadth
of her charity Miss Tish wishes to assist a fellow man--"

Hannah reeled back and freed my arm.

"My God!" she whispered. "You too!"

I am very fond of Hannah, who has lived with Tish for many years; but I
had small patience with her that morning.

"I cannot see how it concerns you, anyhow, Hannah," I observed severely.

Hannah put her apron to her eyes and sniffled into it.

"Oh, you can't, can't you!" she wailed. "Don't I give him half his
meals, with him soft-soapin' Miss Tish till she can't see for suds?
Ain't I fallin' over him mornin', noon, and night, and the postman
telling all over the block he's my steady company--that snip that's not
eighteen yet? And don't I do the washin'? And will you look round the
place and count the things I've got to do up every week? And don't he
talk to me in that lingo of his, so I don't know whether he's askin' for
a cup of coffee or insultin' me?"

I patted Hannah on the arm. After all, none of the exaltation of a good
deed upheld Hannah as it sustained us.

"We are going to help him help himself, Hannah," I said kindly. "He
hasn't found himself. Be gentle with him. Remember he comes from the
land of the Bible."

"Humph!" said Hannah, who reads the newspapers. "So does the plague!"

The problem we had set ourselves we worked out that morning. As Tish
said, the boy ought to have light work, for the Syrians are not a
laboring people.

"Their occupation is--er--mainly pastoral," she said, with the authority
of the encyclopaedia. "Grazing their herds and gathering figs and olives.
If we knew some one who needed a shepherd--"

Aggie opposed the shepherd idea, however. As she said, and with reason,
the climate is too rigorous. "It's all well enough in Syria," she said,
"where they have no cold weather; but he'd take his death of pneumonia
here."

We put the shepherd idea reluctantly aside. My own notion of finding a
camel for him to look after was negatived by Tish at once, and properly
enough I realized.

"The only camels are in circuses," she said, "and our duty to