any personal questions about Mrs.
Blythe of _Orphant Annie_. (That's the name I
couldn't help giving the young reporter in my
own mind. He was introduced as Mr. Sandford
Berry.) He looks the character to perfection;
sort of old for his years, spry and capable, as
if he'd spent his youth in doing the chores and
shooing the hens away. Besides, he gave me a
lot of wise advice, as if he were a
full-fledged man of the world and I a little
hayseed from the West who didn't know enough to
get out of the way of a go-cart. He has pale
blue pop eyes, and an alert little blond
mustache, and his whole air seems to say, 'The
gobelins'll git you, if you don't watch out.'

"He took it for granted that I knew all about
my future employer, and, of course, I didn't
tell him any better. I just tried in a
roundabout way to lead him on to talk of her.
He is very enthusiastic about her work, though
I gathered only a vague idea of what it is,
despite my clever manoeuvring to find out. He
called her a grand little woman. As he has
interviewed her several times he knows her
personally. What he said was certainly
encouraging, but he finished his supper so soon
after he began to talk about her that I came
up-stairs still knowing very little more than
when I went down.

"A street light glimmered in the front windows,
so that I did not turn on the gas at first, but
sat looking down at the people strolling along
the pavement below. The house stands very close
to the street, so that I could hear everything
any one said in passing, and it seemed to bring
me right into the thick of things, as I so
often wished to be, back there in the desert.
The warm, wet smell of the freshly sprinkled
streets, the whiff of an occasional cigar, the
sound of a street piano in the next block, all
seemed so strange yet so friendly and sociable.
It made me feel for a little while--oh, I can
hardly explain it--as if the old Mary Ware that
I used to be was a million miles away, and as
if the Mary Ware sitting here in Riverville was
an entirely different person. I couldn't make
it seem possible that the