t a word, but content; and his eyes brimmed with
visions.

Patsy watched him tenderly. "Who knows--he may find greatness on his
road. Who knows?"

The tinker dropped the bundle he had brought back from the store into
her lap, but she scarcely heeded him. Her eyes were looking out into
the gathering dusk while her voice sank almost to a whisper.

"_Ochone!_ but I've always envied that piper fellow from Hamelin
town. Think of being able to gather up all the childther hereabouts,
eager, hungry-hearted childther with mothers too busy or deaf to heed
them, and leading them away to find their fortunes! Wouldn't that be
wonderful, just?"

"What kind of fortunes?" asked the tinker.

"What but the best kind!" Patsy thought for a moment, and smiled
whimsically while her eyes grew strangely starry in that early
twilight. "Wouldn't I like to be choosing those fortunes, and
wouldn't they be an odd lot, entirely! There'd be singing hearts that
had learned to sing above trouble; there'd be true fellowship--the
kind that finds brotherhood in beggars as well as--as prime
ministers; there'd be peace of soul--not the kind that naps by the
fire, content that the wind doesn't be blowing down his chimney, but
the kind that fights above fighting and keeps neighbor from harrying
neighbor. Troth, the world is in mortial need of fortunes like the
last."

"And wouldn't you be choosin' gold for a fortune?" asked the tinker.

Patsy shook her head vehemently.

"Why not?"

"That's the why!" Suddenly Patsy clenched her hands and shook two
menacing fists against the gathering dark. "I hate gold, along with
the meanness and the lying and the thieving and the false judgment it
brings into the world."

"But the world can't get along without it," reminded the tinker,
shrewdly.

"Aye, but it can. It can get along without the hoarded gold, the
inherited gold, the cheating, bribing, starving gold--that's the kind
I mean, the kind that gets into a man's heart and veins until his
fingers itch to gild everything he touches, like the rich man in the
city yonder."

"What rich man? I thought the--I thought the city was full o' rich
men."

"Maybe; but there's just one I'm thinking of now; and God pity
him--and his son."

The tinker eyed her stupidly. "How d'you know he has a son?"

Patsy laughed. "I guessed--maybe." Then she looked down in her lap.
"And here's the news--with no light left to read it by; and I'm as
hungry as an alley cat--and a