a bed for Grandpa and Grandma and the baby. Fortunately it
was not cold; coats were covering enough.

On the dump Daddy found also an old tub, from which he made a
stove, cutting holes in it, turning it upside down, and fastening
in a stovepipe.

"I don't feel to blame folks so much as I used to for being
dirty," Grandma admitted, when they had done their best to make
the shelter a home. "But all the same, I want for you young-ones
to keep away from them. I saw a baby that looked as if it had
measles."

"If only there was a Center," Rose-Ellen complained, "or if they
even had room for us in school. I feel as if I'd scream, staying
in this horrid tent so much."

"I didn't know," said Daddy, "that there was a place in our whole
country where you couldn't live decent and send your kids to
school if you wanted to."

It was pleasant in the grapefruit grove, where the rich green
trees made good-smelling aisles of clean earth, and the men
picked the pale round fruit ever so carefully, clipping it gently
so as not to bruise the skin and cause decay. It hardly seemed
to belong to the same world as the ill-smelling pickers' camp of
rags, boards, and tin.

Dick lost his job after the first few days. He had been hired
because he was so tall and strong; but the foreman said he was
bruising too much fruit. At first Grandma said she was glad he
was fired, for he had been making himself sick eating fruit. But
she was soon sorry that he had nothing to do.

"And them young rapscallions you run with teach you words and
ways I never thought to see in a Beecham," Grandma scolded.

But if camp was hard for them all, it was hardest for Grandma and
Jimmie and Sally, who seemed always ailing.

"We've got to grit our teeth and hang on," said Grandma.

Then came the Big Storm.

All day the air had been heavy, still; weatherwise pickers
watched the white sky anxiously. In the middle of the night,
Rose-Ellen woke to the shriek of wind and the crack of canvas.
Then, with a splintering crash, the tent-poles collapsed and she
was buried under a mass of wet canvas.

At first she could hear no voice through the howling wind and
battering rain. Then Sally's wail sounded, and Grandma's call:
"Rose-Ellen! Jimmie! Dick! You all right?"

Until dawn the Beechams could only huddle together in the small
refuge Daddy contrived against the dripping, pricking blackness.
When day came, the rain still fell and the wind still blew; but
fi