at I called "my little garden" about it,
Spotswoode tugging up the stoutest roots and clearing out the
wire-grass. With an occasional hand's turn and toss from him I
cultivated the vagrant into extraordinary size and vigor. Not a day
passed in which I did not visit it. Not a blade of grass or a weed was
allowed to invade the charmed circle, and many a spadeful of fresh
mould, black with fatness, was worked about the swelling tuber by my
kind field-hand. He knew that it was to be sent to the Fair in the
fulness of time, and believed with me that "not another beet there could
hold a candle to it."

As the air thickened and heated with rumors of the prodigies to be
revealed on the fifteenth to the lasting honor of Old Powhatan, it was
harder and harder to keep what I knew to myself. I had purposed not to
reveal the secret until my father's wagons were in loading with other
mammoth esculents and his finest corn and tobacco. Then--so ran the
programme--I would march up, bearing my beet with me. It was to be dug
up and cleaned by Spotswoode on the evening of the fourteenth, and kept
safely in hiding for me. I could depend upon his literal obedience,
albeit he never had an original idea.

Temptation befell, and overcame me, on the afternoon of October
thirteenth, a date I was not likely, thenceforward, to forget. All six
of us girls were gathered in the porch, listening to, and relating,
stories of what this one had raised, and that one had made. Mr.
Pemberton had a seven-hundred-pound pig, and Mr. Hobson a rooster more
beautiful than a bird of Paradise. The syrup of Mrs. Hobson's preserves
was as clear as spring water, and Mrs. Pemberton's water melon-rind
sweetmeats had as good as taken the prize.

Paulina Hobson sat on the top step of the porch. She was very fair, and
her hair was nearly as white as her skin. She was fourteen years old,
and wore a grass-green lawn frock. Her eyes were of a paler green, she
had a nasty laugh, and her teeth were not good.

"Isn't it nice that all five of us are going to send something?" she
said complacently. "You know that nobody but exhibitors can go into the
tent for the first hour--from eleven to twelve--so's they can see
everything before the crowd gets in. Who'll you stay with, Miss Molly
Mumchance, when we all leave you?"

I had not spoken while the talk went on, for fear something might slip
out and betray me, prematurely, but I took fire at this.

"I'm going in, myself!" I sna