led old face with an eagle beak and ice-blue
eyes, and he looks as if his favorite winter sport were Turning
Erring Daughters Out into the Snow.

Dan'l is the only child at home now and they both adore him,--the
mother with timid tenderness and the old man with fierce repression.
Even the pup takes on character from the family. I call it
Sweet-Alice-Ben-Bolt, because it very nearly weeps with delight when
you give it a smile and trembles with fear at your frown. The Deacon
is of that large and austere order of persons who "like dogs, in
their place"; S.A.B.B. wears his stumpy, little tail at half mast
whenever the head of the house is near.

There is some mystery about Dan'l's watching for a letter. His mother
yearns over him and says,--"But, maybe to-morrow, Dannie!" but his
father sneers, and then the child seems to shrivel before my eyes.

I wish I could slip some silver-gray fog in this letter, to rub on
your burning brow!

J. V.

_Some Day in October._

My days slip by like pearl-gray beads on a rosary, Michael Daragh. I
honestly haven't an idea of the date. But I know Dan'l's story. We
were sitting on the toppled-over tombstone of a sturdy old patriarch
who had buried four wives, just after the postman went by one day,
and the child said, defensively, as if in answer to my thought----

"But I did get a letter, once!"

I kept mouse-still, and he told me. Last summer there came to Three
Meadows a lazy, charming, gypsy sort of fellow from nowhere, stony
broke, to whom the Deacon gave work for his board. Out of Danny's
clipped phrases I could build up the rogue's personality,--the gay,
lavish, careless, happy-go-lucky-ness which warmed the cockles of the
little lad's hungry heart.

He was here four months, and then a pal wrote him he could get him a
job as handy man with a small circus then in Vermont. But Dan'l's
beloved vagabond hadn't a sou, and before he could tramp there, the
show would be far on its southern way. Naturally, the Deacon refused
a loan--I can just see the way his mouth would snap shut like a trap,
but Dan'l, what with egg money and his tiny garden, and errand money
from summer boarders, had gathered together twenty slow dollars, and
he came lavishly forward. The rover blithely promised to pay him back
in two monthly payments. He's never