ate
household she came, or escaped. There is no public asylum or retreat
within many miles of our mountain, so far as I know. I wonder if we
ought to advertise her in the local newspaper? Or, do you think it
would be kinder to wait and let her people hunt her up? Tell me,
Dolly, dear. The opinion of a child often goes straight to the point."

"Oh! Don't advertise, please, Mr. Seth! Think. If she belonged to you
or me we wouldn't want it put in the paper that--about--you know, the
lost one being not quite right, someway. If anybody's loved her well
enough to keep her out of an asylum they've loved her well enough to
come and find her, quiet like, without anybody but kind hearted people
having to know. If they don't love her--well, she's all right for now.
Dinah's put her to bed and told me, just before I came away, that it
was only the exposure which had made her ill. She had roused all
right, after a nap, and had taken a real hearty breakfast. She's about
as big as I am and Dinah's going to put some of my clothes on her
while her own are done up. Everybody in the house was so interested
and kind about her, I was surprised."

"You needn't have been. People who have lived with such a mistress as
Madam Betty Calvert must have learned kindness, even if they learned
nothing else."

Dorothy laughed. "Dear Mr. Seth, you love my darling Aunt Betty, too,
don't you, like everybody does?"

"Of course, and loyally. That doesn't prevent my thinking that she
does unwise things."

"O--oh!!"

"Like giving a little girl one hundred dollars at a time to spend in
foolishness."

Dorothy protested: "It wasn't to be foolishness. It was to make people
happy. You yourself say that to 'spread happiness' is the only thing
worth while!"

"Surely, but it doesn't take Uncle Sam's greenbacks to do that. Not
many of them. When you've lived as long as I have you'll have learned
that the things which dollars do _not_ buy are the things that count.
Hello! 'By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way
comes.'"

The blacksmith rose as he finished his quotation and went to the wide
doorway, across which a shadow had fallen, and from whence the sound
of an irritable: "Whoa-oa, there!" had come.

It was a rare patron of that old smithy and Seth concealed his
surprise by addressing not the driver but the horse:

"Well, George Fox! Good-morning to you!"

George Fox was the property of miller Oliver Sands, and the Quaker and
his ste