es, of course, it's
wet there. Cardinals always grow in damp places, along little streams
like this I've slipped my foot into! Oh! aren't they beauties! Won't
dear Aunt Betty go just wild over them! if Father John, the darling
man who 'raised' me, were only here! He's a deal lamer than you, Elsa
Carruthers, but nobody's feet would get over the ground faster than
his crutches if he could just have one glimpse of this wonderland!

"Did you ever notice? Almost all the autumn flowers are either purple
or yellow or white? There are no real blues, no rose-colors; with just
this lovely, lovely cardinal for an exception."

Dorothy sped back to where Elsa stood nervously balancing herself upon
a fallen tree-trunk and laid the brilliant flowers in her hands. Elsa
looked at them in wonder and then exclaimed:

"My! how pretty! They look just as if they were made out of velvet in
the milliner's window! And how did you know all that about the
colors?"

"Oh! Father John, and Mr. Winters--Uncle Seth, he likes me to call
him--the dear man that gave us the Water Lily--they told me. Though I
guessed some things myself. You can't help that, you know, when you
love anything. I think, I just do think, that the little bits of
things which grow right under a body's feet are enough to make one
glad forever. Sometime, when I grow up, if Aunt Betty's willing, and I
don't have to work for my living, I shall build us a little house
right in the woods and live there."

"Pshaw, Dolly Doodles! You couldn't build a house if you tried. And
you'd get mighty sick of staying in the woods all the time, with
nobody coming to visit you----" remarked Mabel coming up behind them.

"I should have the birds and the squirrels, and all the lovely
creatures that live in the forest!"

"And wild-cats, and rattlesnakes, and horrid buggy things! Who'd see
any of your new clothes?"

"I shouldn't want any. I'd wear one frock till it fell to pieces----"

"You wouldn't be let! Mrs. Calvert's awful particular about your
things."

"That's so," commented Aurora. "They're terrible plain but they look
just right, somehow. Righter 'n mine do, Gerry says, though I don't
believe they cost near as much."

"Well, we didn't come into these lovely woods to talk about clothes.
Anybody can make clothes but only the dear God can make a cardinal
flower!" cried Dorothy, springing up, with a sudden sweet reverence on
her mobile face.

Elsa as suddenly bent and kissed her, and