tan was in her eyes.
This was a fight for home and freedom. Her flintlock was between the
cracks of her log cabin. The old mother, with the other women and
children, lay huddled together in the far corners. This was no time for
surrender!

"No!" she cried in a firm voice. "I won't give it back, not till I get
good and ready. Mr. Taylor loaned me that two hundred dollars to make
money with, and he won't get it again till I do." She wondered at her
courage, but it seemed the only way to save her mother from herself.
"What happened forty years ago has nothing to do with what's happening
to-day."

The look in the girl's eyes; her courage; the ring of independence in
her voice, the sureness and confidence of her words, began to have their
effect. The Genie of the Lamp was at work: the life-giving power of Gold
was being pumped from her own into the poor old woman's poverty-shrunken
veins.

"And you don't think, child, that it will bring you trouble?"

"Bring trouble!" No!

The cabin was saved; the enemy was in retreat. She could sing once
more! "It will bring nothing but joy and freedom, you precious old
Mother! Do you know what I'm going to do?"

"What, child?"

"I'm going to pay off the mortgage, every cent of it."

She said "I" now; it had been "we" all the years before: Keep rubbing,
dear old Genie. "Then I'll fix up the house and paint it, and get you
some nice clothes, and a new cook stove that isn't all rusted out----"

"You won't resign, will you, Abbie--and leave me?" the mother exclaimed.
The chill of possible desertion suddenly crept over her, (The Genie is
often unmindful of others, especially the poor.)

"Leave you! What, now? You darling Mother. As to resigning, I may later.
But I'm going to Boston when I get my vacation and stay a week with
Maria, and go to the opera if I never do another thing. Oh! just you
wait, Mother, you and I will lead a different life after this."

"And you think, Abbie, you'll make more than six hundred dollars?"
Already the mother's veins were expanding--wonderful elixir, this
Extract of Gold.

"Six hundred! Why, if the stock goes to what they call par--and that's
where they all go, so Maria says--I'll have--have--two thousand, less
Mr. Taylor's two hundred--I'll have eighteen hundred dollars!" The little
fellow in her bosom was rubbing away now with all his might. She could
hear his heart beat against her own.

*****

It was nearly midnight when the two went to bed