.

"Wouldn't it be strange, Billie, if either of us were famous some day,"
she said, thoughtfully, "and this picture would just be priceless? You
know, that's one thing awfully nice about us two. We've always appreciated
each other so much. I know you're going to be somebody special. Maybe it
will just be in natural history, but I wish it were exploring, or
something awfully adventurous."

Billie laughed comfortably, perching himself just below her on the heavy
timbers of the old sluice gate.

"Grandfather says I have a great responsibility on my shoulders, because
I'm the last of the Ellis family. He says there's always been an Ellis in
the State Legislature at Hartford, ever since there was a Legislature,
and just as soon as I'm old enough, he's going to set me to reading law.
Gee, I wish he wouldn't. Think of being shut up all day long in an
office."

Far down the lane they heard the others calling them and Kit sprang up,
scattering the apples as she did so.

"I'd forgotten all about the party," she exclaimed. "Anyway, I'm glad we
had a chance to talk, because I won't see you again before I leave. If I
were you, I'd just read and study everything I could lay my hands on about
entymology, all the time I was in school, and then when the Judge sees
that you're in dead earnest about it, he'll let you go on if Cousin Roxy
says so. I heard Dad say that Mr. Howard knew more about insects than any
man he'd ever met, and that he was considered one of the coming experts in
government work. Why, Billie, it's just like a great surgeon or doctor,
who is able to discover a certain germ that can be used as a toxin, only
you doctor Mother Nature."

"I know," Billie agreed, enthusiastically. "There was some fellow who
discovered the cause of the wheat blight in the south a few years ago, and
somebody else is trying to land whatever is killing our chestnuts off.
Kit, you're a bully pal. If it wasn't for you, I don't know whether I'd
ever have seen a chance to win out or not, but you do spur a fellow on."

Kit laughed, and tagged him on the shoulder as she broke into a run.

"You're it," she cried. "Don't give any one else the credit for starting
you off in the way you know you ought to go. Just take a good deep breath
and race for it."

CHAPTER VI

EXPECTING "KIT"

Mr. Robbins had answered the first letter from Delphi, under Kit's careful
supervision, and the acceptance was couched in language ambiguous enough
to