night dinner was served at a table which showed
a vacant place; James Clayton was reported to be indisposed. Yet, two
hours later, after a sharp peal of the doorbell and a hasty knocking at
his chamber door by the maid, James Clayton left the house; and one who
met him on the steps said that his face was certainly not that of a
sick man.

It was after breakfast the next morning, before the family had
dispersed, that Ethel rushed headlong into the dining-room.

"Oh, James, James!" she cried breathlessly. "It _was_ your letter that
Rover had, and here 't is!"

"But it was n't," retorted the young man airily. "I got mine last
night--special delivery."

"But it is yours. Teddy found it in a hole under the barn. See!"
crowed Ethel; and she thrust into his hand a tattered, chewed,
bedraggled envelope whose seal was yet unbroken.

"Well, by George--'t is for me," muttered the young man, as he descried
his own name among the marks left by dirt-stained paws and sharp little
teeth. "Humph!" he ejaculated a moment later, eyeing the torn and
crumpled sheet of paper which the envelope had contained.

"Well?" prompted several voices.

"It's an advertising letter from the Clover Farm kennels," he
announced, with a slight twitching of his lips. "Do you think
we--er--need another--dog?"

The Indivisible Five

At the ages of fifty-four and fifty, respectively, Mr. and Mrs.
Wentworth found themselves possessed of a roomy, old-fashioned
farmhouse near a thriving city, together with large holdings of lands,
mortgages, and bank stock. At the same time they awoke to an
unpleasant realization that many of their fellow creatures were not so
fortunate.

"James," began Mrs. Wentworth, with some hesitation, one June day,
"I've been thinking--with all our rambling rooms and great big yards,
and we with never a chick nor a child to enjoy them--I 've been
thinking--that is, I went by the orphan asylum in town yesterday and
saw the poor little mites playing in that miserable brick oven they
call a yard, and--well, don't you think we ought to have one--or maybe
two--of them down here for a week or two, just to show them what summer
really is?"

The man's face beamed.

"My dear, it's the very thing! We'll take two--they'll be company for
each other; only"--he looked doubtfully at the stout little woman
opposite--"the worst of it will come on you, Mary. Of course Hannah
can manage the work part, I suppose, but the noise--