g old
furniture. I sold her every blessed thing in the blue north room
except Mother's carpet and Grandma's mats and sampler. She wanted
those too, but I couldn't part with them. She bought everything else
and," Sara lifted her hands, full of bills, dramatically, "here are
two hundred and fifty dollars to take you to the Valley Academy next
fall, Ray."

"It wouldn't be fair to take it for that," said Ray, flushing. "You
and Will--" "Will and I say you must take it," said Sara. "Don't we,
Will? There is nothing we want so much as to give you a college start.
It is an enormous burden off my mind to think it is so nicely provided
for. Besides, most of those old things were yours by the right of
rediscovery, and you voted first of all to have Aunt Josephina come."

"You must take it, of course, Ray," said Willard. "Nothing else would
give Sara and me so much pleasure. A blessing on Aunt Josephina."

"Amen," said Sara and Ray.

The Christmas Surprise at Enderly Road

"Phil, I'm getting fearfully hungry. When are we going to strike
civilization?"

The speaker was my chum, Frank Ward. We were home from our academy for
the Christmas holidays and had been amusing ourselves on this sunshiny
December afternoon by a tramp through the "back lands," as the barrens
that swept away south behind the village were called. They were grown
over with scrub maple and spruce, and were quite pathless save for
meandering sheep tracks that crossed and recrossed, but led apparently
nowhere.

Frank and I did not know exactly where we were, but the back lands
were not so extensive but that we would come out somewhere if we kept
on. It was getting late and we wished to go home.

"I have an idea that we ought to strike civilization somewhere up the
Enderly Road pretty soon," I answered.

"Do you call _that_ civilization?" said Frank, with a laugh.

No Blackburn Hill boy was ever known to miss an opportunity of
flinging a slur at Enderly Road, even if no Enderly Roader were by to
feel the sting.

Enderly Road was a miserable little settlement straggling back from
Blackburn Hill. It was a forsaken looking place, and the people, as a
rule, were poor and shiftless. Between Blackburn Hill and Enderly Road
very little social intercourse existed and, as the Road people
resented what they called the pride of Blackburn Hill, there was a
good deal of bad feeling between the two districts.

Presently Frank and I came out on the Enderly Ro