think you could let me have a
little?"

"Why, of course! you can have all my month's allowance. But why don't
you ask father?"

"No; I've asked him too much lately. He refused point blank last time.
I didn't like the way he spoke."

"Well, you can have all mine," said Bess, whispering.

George and she were great friends, and there was not a thing that
Bessie would not have done for her big brother, who was her hero. What
he wanted with so much money she never asked.

They were still whispering together, and Clara had just risen to go
upstairs, and Alice and Will had finished the translation, and Will was
just on the point of seeing how near he could come to throwing the
Commentaries of Caesar into an ornamental Japanese jar across the room,
when Mrs. Hardy parted the curtains at the arch and beckoned her
children to come into the next room. Her face was exceedingly pale,
and she was trembling as if with some great terror.

The children all cried out in surprise and hurried into the next room.
But before relating what happened there, we will follow Mr. Hardy into
the experience he had, just after falling asleep upon the lounge by the
open fire.

It seemed to him that he stepped at once from the room where he lay
into a place such as he had never seen before, where the one great idea
that filled his entire thought was that of the Present Moment. Spread
out before him as if reproduced by a phonograph and a magic lantern
combined was the moving panorama of the entire world. He thought he
saw into every home, every public place of business, every saloon and
place of amusement, every shop and every farm, every place of industry,
pleasure, and vice upon the face of the globe. And he thought he could
hear the world's conversation, catch its sobs of suffering--nay, even
catch the meaning of unspoken thoughts of the heart. With that absurd
rapidity peculiar to certain dreams, he fancied that over every city on
the globe was placed a glass cover through which he could look, and
through which the sounds of the city's industry came to him. But he
thought that he ascertained that by lifting off one of these covers he
could hear with greater distinctness the thoughts of the inhabitants,
and see all they were doing and suffering, with the most minute
exactness. He looked for the place of his own town--Barton. There it
lay in its geographical spot on the globe, and he thought that, moved
by an impulse he could not r