p stray buttons about the house with which to satisfy the
demands of any other youthful collectors. On Wednesday two more answers
were received, one from Mrs. Grinnell, containing forty of the oddest
looking buttons the girls had ever seen; and one from a stranger in
Chicago, probably a friend of Lorene's, for she, too, asked for buttons
in return.

Peace sighed, divided the contents of the two packages with an impartial
hand, and remarked, "It's lucky Mrs. Grinnell don't want forty in
exchange. We had only thirty-six to begin with, and Lorene's twelve and
this girl's eight leaves us only sixteen, s'posing we get many more
answers asking for some."

Fortunately for her peace of mind, however, only one other letter made
such a request, but a new dilemma arose. Packages began to arrive with
insufficient postage, and the crippled girl's pocket money vanished with
alarming rapidity. The letter carrier always delivered the daily budget
of mail to the little maid under the trees when the weather permitted of
her being at her post, and it chanced that for a fortnight after the
answers to her endless chain began pouring in, she received her own
mail, so no one but Allee knew her secret, and there was no one but
Allee to help her out with her heavy postage bills.

"I never s'posed anyone would send out packages without enough stamps on
'em," she complained to her loyal supporter one night, after an
unusually heavy mail and a correspondingly heavy drain on her
pocketbook. "And the trouble is, the letters that have the most money to
pay on them hold the ugliest buttons. I spent twelve cents for stamps
today. That's the worst yet. Yesterday it was ten, and seven the day
before. There won't be much of my monthly dollar left if it keeps on
this way. The postman got sassy this morning and asked me if I'd started
a--a correspondence school, or if I was having a birthday shower every
day. I'm tired of the sight of buttons!"

"Already?" cried Allee. "Why, I think they are fine. If your dollar is
all spent before the month is up, you can use mine. I ought to pay half
the stampage anyway, as long as I get half the buttons. All the girls at
school are wild to know where we get so many, but I won't tell. There's
eight hundred on your string and seven hundred and fifty on mine."

"But I divided 'em even--"

"I know you did, but you see, I traded some, and Dolly Thomas cried
'cause she had only twenty buttons on her string, so I gave her