y in silence, "was the difference between thinking and wondering?"

Worth maturely crossed his knees as a sign of the maturity of the
subject. "Well, I don't know, 'cept when you think you know what you're
thinking about, and when you wonder you just don't know anything."

"Maybe you wonder when you don't know what to think," Katie suggested.

"Yes, maybe so. There's more to wonder about than there is to think
about, don't you think so, Aunt Kate?"

"I wonder," she laughed.

"You do wonder, don't you, Aunt Kate? You wonder more than you think."

She flashed him a keen, queer look.

"Worth," she asked, after another pause in which the mind of twenty-five
and the mind of six were wondering in their respective fashions, "do you
know anything about the underlying principles of life?"

"The what, Aunt Kate?"

"Underlying principles of life," she repeated grimly.

"Why no," he acknowledged, "I guess I never heard of them."

"I never did either, till just lately. I want to find out something about
them. Do you know, Worthie dear, I'd go a long way to find out something
about them."

"Where would you have to go, Aunt Kate? Could you go in a boat?"

"No, I fear you couldn't go in a boat. Trouble is," she murmured, more to
herself than to him, "I don't know where you _would_ go."

"Don't Papa know 'bout them?"

"I sometimes think he would like to learn."

"Papa knows all there is to know 'bout guns and powders," defended
Worth loyally.

"Yes, I know; but I don't believe guns and powders have any power to get
you to these underlying principles of life."

"Well, what _does_ get you there?" demanded her companion of the
practical sex.

She laughed. "I don't know, dear. I honestly don't know. And I'd like to
know. Perhaps some time I will meet some one who is very wise, and then
I'll ask whether it is experience, or wisdom, or sympathy. Whether some
people are born to get there and other people not, or just how it is."

"Watts says you have more sympathy than wisdom, Aunt Kate."

"You mustn't talk about me to Watts," she admonished spiritedly. Then in
the distance she heard a mocking voice insinuatingly inquiring: "But why
not, if it's all one world?"

"But he said," Worth added, "that it shouldn't be held against you,
'cause of course you never had half a chance. No, it wasn't Watts said
that, either. It was the man that mends the boats. It was Watts said you
was a yard wide."

Katie's head had gone up; s