dith, the eldest, sat with her work. It was unusual work for a girl of
barely sixteen. A large old-fashioned basket was on the floor by her
side, with piles of children's clothes in it, and she was slowly and
laboriously darning a stocking over a china egg.

The children had no mother, and a good deal devolved upon Edith.

Jack and Cynthia, the twins, came next in age, and they were just
fourteen. They looked alike though Jack was much the taller of the two,
and his hair did not curl so tightly as Cynthia's. She sat on the steps
of the piazza. Her sailor hat was cast on the ground at her feet, and
her pretty golden-brown hair was, as usual, somewhat awry.

It was one of the trials of Edith's life that Cynthia's hair would not
keep smooth.

Jack lay at full length on the grass, sometimes flat on his back,
staring at the sky, sometimes rolling over, the more easily to address
his sisters.

Jack had a project in his mind, and was very much in earnest. Cynthia,
of course, was already on his side--she had known of it from the first
moment the idea popped into his head, but Edith had just been told, and
she needed convincing.

Janet and Willy, "the children," were playing at the other end of the
porch. They were only six and five, and did not count in the family
discussions.

"There's money in it, I'm sure," said Jack; "and if I can only get
father to agree with me and advance some money, I can pay him back in
less than a year."

"Papa hasn't much money to spare just now," said Edith, "and I have
always heard that there was a good deal of risk about raising chickens
from an incubator."

"My dear girl," returned Jack, with an air of lofty authority, "allow me
to say that you don't know much about it. I've been reading upon hens
for two days, and I find that, allowing for all risks--bad eggs,
inexperience, weasels, and skunks, and diseases, you're sure to make
some profit at the end of a year. Now, I'm late in thinking of it, I
know. To-morrow is the 1st of May, and I couldn't get more than three
hatches this summer, but that would probably pay the cost of the
incubator. I can get a first-rate one for forty dollars, and I can buy
one 'brooder.' If I bought one I could make the others like it."

"But your eggs?" said Edith. "You would have to pay a great deal for
eggs."

"Eggs would be about five or six dollars a hundred, and it takes two
hundred to fill the machine. I should want to get a fine breed, of
course--B