morning; in the evening Paul was too tired, and on Sundays
there was always "Company," it being practically their only time for
daylight entertainment. Often Paul brought a business associate home for
dinner; his family or hers came in; there were always callers in the
afternoon; and they were usually invited out to supper or had guests
themselves. It was the busiest day of the week.

Ever since her father's death she had been reviving in her mind, shocked
to find them so few, her positive, personal recollections of him, and
one of them now came back to her with a symbolic meaning. It had been a
not uncommon occurrence in her childhood--a school picnic in the Black
Rock woods; but this one stood out from all the others because, by what
freak of chance she never knew, her father had gone with her instead of
her mother. How proud she had been to have him there! How eagerly she
had done the honors of the "entertainment"! How anxiously she had hoped
that he would be pleased with the recitations, the songs, the May-day
dance!

One of the events of the day was to be the recitation of a fairy poem by
a boy in one of the upper grades. He was to step out of the bushes in
the character of a Brownie. The child had but just thrust his head
through the leaves and begun, "I come to tell ye of a world ye mortals
wot not of," when a terrific clap of thunder overhead, followed by
lightning, and rain in torrents, broke up the picnic and sent everyone
flying for shelter to a near-by barn. Lydia had been very much afraid of
thunderstorms, and she could still remember how, through all her
confusion and terror, she had admired the fixity of purpose of the
little Brownie, piteous in his drenched fairy costume, gasping out, as
they ran along: "I come to tell ye--I come to tell ye, mortals--" to his
scurrying audience.

When they reached the barn and were huddled in the hay, wet and forlorn,
and deafened by the peals of thunder, the determined little boy had
stood up on a farm wagon on the barn floor, and the instant the storm
abated began again with his insistent tidings of a world they wot not
of. With her father's death fresh in her mind, Lydia could not without
a throb of pain recall his rare outburst of hearty laughter at the
child's perseverance. "I bet on that kid!" he had cried out, applauding
vigorously at the end. "Who _is_ he?"

"Paul Hollister," she had told him, proud to know the bigger children.
"He's a very especial friend of