she would be sometimes
necessary, and always welcome.

And there would be Manzanita, and the child,--and after a while, other
children. There would be little bibs to tie, little prayers to hear,
deep consultations over teeth and measles, over morals and manners. And
who but Grandmother could fill Grandmother's place?

Mrs. Phelps leaned back in her chair, and shut her eyes. She saw
visions. After a while a tear slipped from between her lashes.

RISING WATER

"If only my poor child had a sensible mother," said Mrs. Tressady,
calmly, "I suppose we would get Big Hong's 'carshen' for him, and that
would do perfectly! But I will not have a Chinese man for Timothy's
nurse! It seems all wrong, somehow."

"Big Hong hasn't got a female cousin, I suppose?" said Timothy's
father; "a Chinese woman wouldn't be so bad." "Oh, I think it would be
as bad--nearly," Mrs. Tressady returned with vivacity. "Anyway, this
particular carshen is a man--'My carshen lun floot store'--that's who
it is!"

"Will you kindly explain what 'My carshen lun floot store' means?"
asked a young man who was lying in a hammock that he lazily moved now
and then by means of a white-shod foot. This was Peter Porter, who,
with his wife, completed the little group on the Tressadys' roomy,
shady side porch.

"It means my cousin who runs a fruit store," supplied Mrs. Porter--a
big-boned, superb blonde who was in a deep chair sewing buttons on
Timothy Tressady's new rompers. "Even I can see that--if I'm not a
native of California."

"Yes, that's it," Mrs. Tressady said absently. "Go back and read those
Situations Wanted over again, Jerry," she commanded with a decisive
snip of the elastic she was cunningly inserting into more new rompers
for Timothy.

Jerry Tressady obediently sat up in his steamer chair and flattened a
copy of the Emville Mail upon his knee.

The problem under discussion this morning was that of getting a nurse
for Timothy Tressady, aged two years. Elma, the silent, undemonstrative
Swedish woman who had been with the family since Timothy's birth, had
started back to Stockholm two months ago, and since then at least a
dozen unsatisfactory applicants for her position had taken their turn
at the Rising Water Ranch.

Mrs. Tressady, born and brought up in New York, sometimes sighed as she
thought of her mother's capped and aproned maids; of Aunt Anna's maids;
of her sister Lydia's maids. Sometimes in the hot summer, when the sun
h