wants you to go
and wash for him to-day."

"He won't pay me a cent if I go," answered the woman moodily; "all my
drudgery for that family goes to pay the rent of this miserable old
shell."

"I think he will give you something to-day, mother, if you tell him how
needy we are," suggested the boy.

"Never a cent," said the woman, with a gloomy shake of her head;
"however, I may as well go. I shall get a cup of tea and bit of dinner,
and I'll look out to bring you a cake, Willie."

"O, will you, mother?" exclaimed the boy, his wan features brightening
momentarily at the prospect of a single cake to appease the gnawings of
hunger.

The woman threw a coarse, threadbare blanket over her shoulders and went
forth, while the boy bent his way along the riverbank in search of dry
twigs and branches with which to replenish their wasted stock of fuel.
And he thought, as he picked up here and there the scanty sticks and laid
them in small bundles, of some lines of poetry he read on a bit of
newspaper that blew across his path one day:

"If joy and pain in this nether world,
Must fairly balanced be,
O, why not some of the _pain_ to them.
And some of the _joy_ to me?"

And he could not settle the point in his youthful mind. He could not
tell why David Pimble should go to school the year round at the great,
white seminary on the hill, while he could only go about two months in
the cold, biting winter to a town-school a mile distant. He could not
tell why said David should have warm woollen jackets, while his were
threadbare and patched with rags; nor why David should fare sumptuously
on buttered toast and smoking muffins, while he starved on the crusts
that were cast from his well-spread table.

All these were knotty points which poor little Willie Danforth was too
young and untaught to solve. When he should be older and wiser, would he
be able to solve them? He didn't know;--he hoped so; though he feared he
never would be much wiser than now, if he was always to remain so poor,
and be debarred from the privilege of attending school.

There's one school whose doors are and have ever been open wide for
Willie--the school of poverty and experience. Lessons swift and bitter
are indelibly impressed on the minds of the pupils there.

Thoughtful and abstracted, Willie wandered along, gathering his little
bundles of firewood, till he found himself at the foot of the hill on
which stood the great, white seminar