hot as a furnace on the naked plain in the blazing sun.

"America's pitiful boast!" said the young radical, looking back at it.
"Only a miserable hint of what it might be."

All that forenoon, as Lily faced her noisy group of barefooted children,
she was thinking of Radbourn, of his almost fierce sympathy for these
poor, supine farmers, hopeless and in some cases content in their narrow
lives. The children almost worshipped the beautiful girl who came to
them as a revelation of exquisite neatness and taste,--whose very voice
and intonation awed them.

They noted, unconsciously of course, every detail. Snowy linen, touches
of soft color, graceful lines of bust and side, the slender fingers that
could almost speak, so beautifully flexile were they. Lily herself
sometimes, when she shook the calloused, knotted, stiffened hands of the
women, shuddered with sympathetic pain to think that the crowning wonder
and beauty of God's world should be so maimed and distorted from its
true purpose.

Even in the children before her she could see the inherited results of
fruitless labor, and, more pitiful yet, in the bent shoulders of the
older ones she could see the beginnings of deformity that would soon be
permanent; and as these thoughts came to her, she clasped the wondering
children to her side, with a convulsive wish to make life a little
brighter for them.

"How is your mother to-day?" she asked of Sadie Burns, as she was eating
her luncheon on the drab-colored table near the open window.

"Purty well," said Sadie, in a hesitating way.

Lily was looking out, and listening to the gophers whistling as they
raced to and fro. She could see Bob Burns lying at length on the grass
in the pasture over the fence, his heels waving in the air, his hands
holding a string which formed a snare. It was like fishing to young
Izaak Walton.

It was very still and hot, and the cheep and trill of the gophers and
the chatter of the kingbirds alone broke the silence. A cloud of
butterflies were fluttering about a pool near; a couple of big flies
buzzed and mumbled on the pane.

"What ails your mother?" Lily asked, recovering herself and looking at
Sadie, who was distinctly ill at ease.

"Oh, I dunno," Sadie replied, putting one bare foot across the other.

Lily insisted.

"She 'n' pa's had an awful row--"

"Sadie!" said the teacher, warningly, "what language!"

"I mean they quarrelled, an' she don't speak to him any more."

"Why, h