nced in that forest of flame? Here the leaves hung brown and
shrivelled on the denuded branches, stray flakes of snow were in the
air, and the early twilight fell chill and dreary.

'I'm terrible glad to see you, Pauline, though I hated to spoil your
visit,' said Mr Harding, as he gave Abraham Lincoln a taste of the whip.

Pauline leaned towards him, and laid both hands upon his arm.

'Poor father! I am so sorry for you! Now tell me all about it.'

And the tired man turned to the daughter who for his sake had left ease
and beauty and friends, and shifted to her shoulders the burden which
he found too heavy for his own.

The children crowded to meet her as she stumbled through the narrow
hall-way into the kitchen. How dark it was! Her quick glance
comprehended the whole scene, and the contrast between it and that other
home-coming smote her with a keen sense of physical pain. She looked at
the solitary lamp with its grotesquely hideous ornament of red flannel,
at Susan's expressionless, freckled face, at the boys in their
copper-toed boots and overalls, at the good-natured, but hopelessly
common-place Martha Spriggs, with her thin hair drawn tight into a knob
the size of a bullet, and her bare arms akimbo. 'Idealize her real!'
Would it be possible to idealize anything at Sleepy Hollow?

She got her welcome in various fashions.

'It's about time you were getting back!' exclaimed Mrs Harding from the
bed on which she was forced to lie, in bitterness of spirit, with Polly
by her side. 'I suppose nothing less than a stroke would have brought
you. It beats me how people can be such sponges! I'm thankful I was
never one to go trailin' about the country after my relations. I never
was away from home more than a day in my life till I was married, and
it's been nothing but work ever since, and now to be laid here like a
useless log, with everything going hotfoot to destruction! It's a good
thing you've come at last, for the children are makin' sawdust and
splinters of every bit of crockery in the house, and that Martha Spriggs
has no more management than a settin' hen. I don't suppose you'll be
much better, though. You never did hev much of a head, an' now you've
been up among the clouds so long, you'll be more like to sugar the
butter and salt the pies than before.'

Pauline lifted Polly from her uncomfortable position with a warm glow
about her heart, which all the sick woman's bitterness was powerless to
quench. If she