it in at the top o' the column. My boy is out, but this young man can
help me lift the page into the press. She's all warmed up, and I was going
to start printing when Edgar comes back from breakfast."

He grabbed the piece of copy and went off into the printing room,
chuckling. Half an hour later the first paper came from the press, and
Ruth and Tom bent over it. The item the girl had written was plainly
printed in the position she had chosen on the front page of the _Harpoon_.

"Now, you are to keep still about this," Ruth said, threatening Mr. Payne
with a raised finger.

"I don't know a thing about it," he promised, pocketing the bill she took
from her purse, and in high good humor over the joke.

Tom helped him take the front page from the press again. The printer
unlocked the chase, and removed and distributed the three lines he had set
up at Ruth's direction.

The crowd from Beach Plum Point came over in the cars about noontime. Aunt
Kate had remained at the inn on this morning, and she and Ruth walked to
the "location," which was a beautiful old shaded front yard at the far end
of the village.

Helen and Jennie had come with the real actors, and were to appear in the
picture. The story related incidents at a Sunday-school picnic, and most
of the comedy had already been filmed on the lot.

The scene around the long sewing table under the trees, when the ladies'
aid was at work with needle and tongue, should be the principal incident
of this reel devoted to the picnic.

The heroine, to the amazement of the village gossips, has run away with
the schoolmaster and married him in the next county. A certain character
in the picture runs in with this bombshell of news and explodes it in the
midst of the group about the sewing table.

The day before this point had failed to make much impression upon the
amateur members of the company engaged in this typical scene. The
Herringport ladies were not at all interested in such a thing happening to
the town's schoolmaster, for to tell the truth the local schoolmaster was
an old married man with a house full of children and nothing at all
romantic about him.

Ruth took Mr. Hooley aside and showed him the copy of the _Harpoon_ she
had had printed, and whispered to him her idea of the change in the action
of the scenario. He seized upon the scheme--and the paper--with gusto.

"You are a jewel, Miss Fielding!" he declared. "If this doesn't make those
old tabbies come t