boughs
lighted the bare floor and rested on the great writing table in the
center of the room and on the high dark dresser. Catherine's gaze,
following the light, rested at last upon the low bookcases filling the
chimney corners.

"I can spare one _Child's Garden of Verses_," she mused, "and that
second _Little Women_. I wish they could have the Walter Crane and
Kate Greenaway picture-books, but I couldn't possibly let them go. I
loved those little urchins in the children's room,--especially that
curly-headed little boy reading a bound _Wide-Awake_--O!" She sat
up in bed and tossed her thick braids back. "I wonder if I ought? Or
even if I could?" Out of bed she slipped, and crossed the room to the
bookcases. Opening one, she ran her finger-tips tenderly along the stout
backs of a row of dark red volumes. "My very own _Wide-Awakes_!
What a storehouse they would be for the little folk! They needn't be
allowed to circulate, so they'd not wear out badly. They could just come
in and read them there. I was going to give them my little
rocking-chair, anyhow. O, dear! I'm afraid I'm really going to let them
have you, you dear, dear books. It would be selfish to keep you up here
all the time, when I almost never open you. Nobody shall have this one,
though, with Hannah's letter in it."

She turned the pages of one of the latest volumes and paused at a neat
little paragraph:

"_Dear Wide-Awake:_

"I have been taking you ever since I was a child. I will be
fourteen my next birthday. I like you very much. I would like to
correspond with any one who is about my age. I have no brothers
and sisters, and get very lonely. I have read all Miss Alcott,
but I wish she had let Jo marry Laurie. I like the
_Wide-Awake_ stories. Please have a good long one about
boarding-school in the next number. I like Dickens, but I can't
bear Scott. I know John Gilpin and Baby Bell by heart, and I am
in the eighth grade. I like skating and rowing. There is a fine
pond near us.

"Your loving reader,

"Violet Ethelyn Eldred.

"P. S. Nobody knows that I am writing this letter, so please
print it soon to surprise them."

Catherine kissed the page and closed the book. "Isn't it too
unbelievable that that queer little letter with that ridiculous fancy
name at the end should have done so much? Violet Ethelyn Eldred! It
hasn'