She meant the factory children. In her car ride from the school where
she taught to the bridge that spanned the river between Pottstown, the
sooty little manufacturing village on one side, and Point Pleasant,
which was merely a hamlet, on the other, she had seen dozens of them,
playing and quarrelling on the streets or peering wistfully out of
dingy tenement windows.

"Tomorrow is Saturday," she reflected, "and they've no better place to
play in than the back streets and yards. It's a shame. There's work
for our philanthropists here, but they don't seem to see it. Well, I'm
so sorry for them it hurts me to look at them, but I can't do
anything."

Miss Cordelia sighed and then brightened up, because she realized that
she was turning her back upon Pottstown for two blissful days and
going to Point Pleasant, which had just one straggling, elm-shaded
street hedging on old-fashioned gardens and cosy little houses and
trailing off into the real country in a half-hour's walk.

Miss Cordelia lived alone in a tiny house at Point Pleasant. It was so
tiny that you would have wondered how anyone could live in it.

"But it's plenty big for a little old maid like me," Miss Cordelia
would have told you. "And it's my own--I'm queen there. There's solid
comfort in having one spot for your own self. To be sure, if I had
less land and more house it would be better."

Miss Cordelia always laughed here. It was one of her jokes. There was
a four-acre field behind the house. Both had been left to her by an
uncle. The field was of no use to Miss Cordelia; she didn't keep a cow
and she hadn't time to make a garden. But she liked her field; when
people asked her why she didn't sell it she said:

"I'm fond of it. I like to walk around in it when the grass grows
long. And it may come in handy some time. Mother used to say if you
kept anything seven years it would come to use. I've had my field a
good bit longer than that, but maybe the time will come yet. Meanwhile
I rejoice in the fact that I am a landed proprietor to the extent of
four acres."

Miss Cordelia had thought of converting her field into a playground
for the factory children and asking detachments of them over on
Saturday afternoon. But she knew that her Point Pleasant neighbours
would object to this, so that project was dropped.

When Miss Cordelia pushed open her little gate, hung crookedly in a
very compact and prim spruce hedge, she stopped in amazement and said,
"Well