eded sorely as soon as
the nurse left. Then she would go over and over the same little round.
She might teach. She knew that she could pass the examination for a
license, but the school was already supplied with a competent teacher,
of many years' experience, whom the trustees would undoubtedly prefer to
a seventeen year old girl just fresh from school herself.

There was stenography--that was something she could master by herself,
and at home, but there was already a stenographer in the Company office,
and there was no other place for one in Lone-Rock. Round and round she
went like one in a treadmill, always to come back to the starting point,
that there was nothing she could do in Lone-Rock to earn money, and she
_must_ earn some, and she could not go away from home. Sometimes the
hopelessness of the situation gave her a wild caged feeling, as if she
must beat herself against the bars of circumstance and make them give
way for her pent-up forces to find an outlet.

The only thing that Mrs. Ware could suggest was that they might
advertise in the Phoenix papers for summer boarders. She had been told
that the year before several camping parties had pitched tents near
Lone-Rock, and they had said that if there were a good boarding place in
the village it could be filled to overflowing with a desirable class of
guests.

So Mary spent an evening, pencil in hand, calculating the probable
expenses and income from such a venture. They could not go into it on a
large scale, the house was too small. The cost of living was high in
Lone-Rock, and the market limited to the canned goods on the shelves of
the Company's stores. Her careful figuring proved that there would be
so little profit in the undertaking that it would not pay to try. But
the evening was not lost. It suggested the vegetable garden, which with
Norman's help she proceeded to start the very next morning.

Plain spading in unbroken sod is not exactly what a boy of thirteen
would call sport, and Norman started at the task with little enthusiasm.
But Mary, following vigorously in his wake with hoe and rake, spurred
him on with visions of the good things they should have to eat and the
fortune they should make selling fresh garden stuff to the summer
campers, till he caught some of her indomitable spirit, and really grew
interested in the work. Mary confined her energies to the vegetables
which she knew would grow in that locality, and which would be sure to
find a