s eager mind played with it, suggesting a thousand
amusing plans. Here was a situation that had possibilities.

In the middle of the afternoon Nort suddenly pretended to be out of a
job, and walking up to Anthy's desk he stood up very straight and stiff,
and pulling at a lock of hair over his forehead, said very respectfully:

"What shall I do next, miss?"

Anthy glanced up at him. It rather offended his vanity that she seemed
so surprised to see him there. Evidently he was very far from her
thoughts. His face was as sober and as blank as the face of nature, but
Anthy saw the spark in his eyes--and the challenge--though she did not
know exactly what he meant.

He pulled his forelock again, and in a voice still more subdued and
respectful, repeated:

"What shall I do next, miss?"

There was a slightly higher colour in Anthy's face, but she looked
squarely into his eyes and said quietly:

"You'd better help Fergus clean up the press."

I shall never forget the look of puzzled wonder and chagrin in Nort's
face as he turned away. Anthy went back to her work with apparent
unconcern.

[Illustration]

CHAPTER X

THE WONDERFUL DAY

Though I live to be a hundred and fifty years old, which heaven forbid,
I shall never forget the events which followed upon the historic
publication of the Poems of Hempfield. I wonder if you have ever
awakened in the morning with a curious deep sense of having some
peculiar reason for being happy? You lie half awake for a moment
wondering what it can all be about, and then it comes suddenly and
vividly alive for you. It was so with me on that morning, and I thought
of the adventures of the printing-office, and of Anthy and Nort and
Fergus and the old Captain.

"Surely," I said to myself, "no one ever had such friends as I have!"

I thought what an amusing world this was, anyway, how full of
captivating people. And I whistled all the way down the stairs, clean
forgetting that this was contrary to one of Harriet's most stringent
rules; and when I went out it seemed to me that the countryside never
looked more beautiful at dawn than it did on that morning.

At Barton's Crossing on my way to town I could see the silvery spire of
the Congregational Church, and at the hill beyond the bridge all
Hempfield lay before me, half hidden in trees, with friendly puffs of
breakfast smoke rising from many chimneys; and when I reached the gate
of the printing-office the sun was just looki