nstrument, perhaps it is worth much more than a hundred dollars.

"Lottie _must_ go again and have her eyes examined. Hopewell will take
her himself next month--the poor, dear little thing! Oh! if daddy's
mine wasn't down there among those hateful Mexicans----

"And I wonder," added the young girl, suddenly, "what one of those real
old violins is worth."

She chanced to be reflecting on this subject on a Saturday afternoon
near the end of the month Hopewell had allowed to Joe Bodley to find
the rest of the purchase price for the violin. She had been up to the
church vestry to attend a meeting of her Girls' Guild. As she passed
the Public Library this thought came to her:

"I'll go in and look in the encyclopaedia. _That_ ought to tell about
old violins."

She looked up Cremona and read about its wonderful violins made in the
sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries by the Amati family
and by Antonio Stradivari and Josef Guarnerius. It did not seem
possible that Hopewell's instrument could be one of these beautifully
wrought violins of the masters; yet----

"Who knows?" sighed Janice. "You read about such instruments coming to
light in such queer places. And Hopewell's fiddle _looks_ awfully old.
From all accounts his father must have been a musician of some
importance, despite the fact that he was thought little of in Polktown
by either his wife or other people. Mr. Drugg might have owned one of
these famous violins--not one of the most ancient, perhaps--and told
nobody here about it. Why! the ordinary Polktownite would think just
as much of a two-dollar-and-a-half fiddle as of a real Stradivarius or
an Amati."

While she was at the task, Janice took some notes of what she read.
While she was about this, Walky Dexter, who brought the mail over from
Middletown, daily, came in with the usual bundle of papers for the
reading desk, and the girl in charge that afternoon hastened to put the
papers in the files.

Major Price had presented the library with a year's subscription to a
New York daily. Janice or Marty always found time to scan each page of
that paper for Mexican news--especially for news of the brigand chief,
Juan Dicampa.

She went to the reading desk after closing and returning the
encyclopaedia to its proper shelf, and spread the New York paper before
her. This day she had not to search for mention of her father's
friend, the Zapatist chief. Right in front of her eyes, at the top