she had not supposed that grown people had such experiences. She
remembered a day during the previous week when she had waked up cross.
A dozen matters went wrong before she left the house to go to school.
On the way the mud pulled off one of her overshoes, and her boot was
soiled before she was shod again. The delay made her five minutes late
and caused a black mark to deface her perfect attendance record. Every
recitation went wrong in one way or another, and every one she spoke to
was as cross as two sticks. As she thought it over she realized that
if what Mrs. Schuler and Moya said was true the whole trouble came from
herself. When she woke up not in the best of humor she ought to have
smoothed herself out before she went down to breakfast, and then she
would have picked her way calmly over the crossing and not tried to
take a short cut through the mud; she would not have been delayed and
earned a tardy mark; she would have had an unclouded mind that could
give its best attention to the recitations so that she would have done
herself justice; people would have been glad to talk to her because she
looked cheerful and was in a sunny mood and no one would have been
cross.

"I guess it was all my fault," she thought. "I guess it will pay to
straighten myself out before I get out of bed every morning."

All was well in and out of Rose House on the morning after the storm.
Every one told her experiences as if she were the only person affected
and they all talked at once and enjoyed themselves immensely. Vladimir
came running up on to the porch in the middle of the morning and threw
himself across his mother's lap.

"Where have you been now?" she asked him. He had come to breakfast
only after being called a dozen times and he had disappeared
immediately after breakfast. "What have you been doing?"

The little fellow laughed and poured into her lap a handful of nickels
and ten-cent pieces.

"Where in the world did you get those?" demanded Mrs. Vereshchagin.
"Who gave them to you?"

"A man in the road."

"A man in the road? All that money? What for?"

"I gave him the shiny thing and he gave me those moneys."

"What shiny thing?"

"The shiny thing I found on the floor."

"Where on the floor?"

"In the dining-room, and the youngster ran into the house to point out
exactly the place where he had found the 'shiny thing.'"

"A 'shiny thing'," repeated Moya, who was putting the room in order and
heard t