l
during the brief hour they spent within the wards. Blue Bonnet soon
began to look forward to these visits, and begged Miss North to allow
her to go as often as possible.

It was on her second visit that she was attracted to a small cot, from
which a pinched little face with wondrous brown eyes looked up
appealingly.

"How do you do?" Blue Bonnet said, dropping down beside the cot and
taking the thin hand on the coverlet in her own.

"How do _you_ do?" came the laconic answer.

"Nicely, thank you."

"Did you bring paper dolls?"

"Yes."

A look of keen disappointment came over the wan face on the pillow.

"I hate 'em! I hoped maybe you had soldiers. Everything here's for
girls!"

"Now, isn't that strange," Blue Bonnet said, untying a parcel with
haste. "I brought things for girls last time--seemed sort of natural to
buy dolls and dishes, being a girl, but this time I brought the very
things you wanted. Soldiers!"

The brown eyes grew round with delight.

"For me? All for me?"

The little hands went out eagerly.

"You may play with them all you like. Perhaps you will want to pass them
on to some other little boy when you tire of them."

"I sha'n't never tire of 'em. I just love 'em. Oh, ain't they grand!
Why, there's a whole lot, ain't they?"

"A regiment," Blue Bonnet said, delighted with the child's enthusiasm.
"And horses! Soldiers must be well mounted, of course!"

The boy was upright in bed now, his face aglow with excitement.

Blue Bonnet made a pillow into a background and put the soldiers in a
row before the child. The next moment he was oblivious of her presence.

"Horses!" he said. "Horses! Gee!"

A laugh, utterly out of proportion to the wasted little body from which
it emerged, rang through the ward.

"I'm afraid you are getting too excited," Blue Bonnet cautioned. "I'll
have to take them away if you make yourself ill with them."

The boy caught up as many of the soldiers and horses as he could, and
held to them tightly.

"You can't get 'em," he said, and the brown eyes flashed. "I wouldn't
give 'em up to nobody."

"You don't have to give them up. You mustn't get excited, that's all.
It's bad for sick people; it gives them fever."

"Aw--I gets fever anyway. I'm used to it. I'm 'bercular! It's in my
knee."

"A tubercular knee?"

The boy nodded, and thrusting a pitifully thin leg from beneath the
covers, showed a knee carefully bandaged. Blue Bonnet hastily covered
it, askin