ame sympathizingly near to
Amasa there; but he had carefully weighed opinions--which he sometimes
confided to Amasa--concerning the amount of study that "paid."

Mother Nature provided one of her loveliest days, as she is apt to do
for school exhibitions in June. The girls, in fleecy muslin clouds, were
so much in evidence that the boys, in the background, were only a little
hampered by the embarrassment of full dress. Cosy Pringle wasn't
hampered at all; he wore his grandfather's large gold chain and his
sister Amanda's moonstone ring, and felt that he ought to attract as
much attention as the girls.

Cosy's voice was a little thin and sharp, but he recited one of
Macaulay's lays with a great deal of "r-r-rolling drum" very well
indeed, having been thoroughly coached by his sister Amanda and the
young minister to whom Amanda was going to be married.

But beyond a little mild clapping, the recitation received no attention
whatever, while Viola Treddick's composition was, as the Bilberry
_Beacon_ reported, received with the greatest enthusiasm. It was on
"School-girl Friendships," and there was some real fun in it; and once
in a while it was pathetic, or, at all events, the audience laughed and
cried, and they couldn't really do that, as Cosy averred they did,
because they liked Viola. It closed with a verse of original poetry, and
Bilberry began to feel sure that a great poet was to arise in its midst.

Lizette stopped and hugged Amasa behind a juniper-tree on the way home
from the exhibition. Viola had staid to a spread that was given to the
pupils and their friends; Lizette had to hurry back to her work in the
factory; and Amasa had felt that he did not shine in society. Amasa
could not remember ever to have seen Lizette cry for joy before; she was
not one of the crying kind, anyway.

"She'll have a chance! Viola will have a chance! She'll get the Pine
Bank School," she said, rapturously. "I've been so afraid she would have
to go into the factory."

Amasa realized suddenly how hard life was for Lizette. Her delicate
hands were calloused and knobby, and her shoulders bent; she looked
wistfully at the library books, and never had time to read; she knew
that she wasn't strong, and she was anxious about their future--Viola's
and his.

It was the very next night, as Amasa was going to bed, that Cosy Pringle
came under his window and called to him. Amasa went down and unfastened
the door, and Cosy followed him up st