s regular gait." He paused, and then
drawing the master's head down towards him, he added in his ear, "When
I get to hev a look at the size and shape o' this yer ball that's in
my hip, I'll--I'll--I'll--be--a--little more kam!" A gleam of dull
significance struggled into his eye. The master evidently understood
him, for he rose quickly, ran to the horse, mounted him and dashed
off for medical assistance, while McKinstry, closing his heavy lids,
anticipated this looked-for calm by fainting gently away.

CHAPTER XIII.

Of the various sentimental fallacies entertained by adult humanity
in regard to childhood, none are more ingeniously inaccurate and
gratuitously idiotic than a comfortable belief in its profound ignorance
of the events in which it daily moves, and the motives and characters
of the people who surround it. Yet even the occasional revelations of an
enfant terrible are as nothing compared to the perilous secrets which
a discreet infant daily buttons up, or secures with a hook-and-eye,
or even fastens with a safety-pin across its gentle bosom. Society can
never cease to be grateful for that tact and consideration--qualities
more often joined with childish intuition and perception than with
matured observation--that they owe to it; and the most accomplished
man or woman of the great world might take a lesson from this little
audience who receive from their lips the lie they feel too palpable,
with round-eyed complacency, or outwardly accept as moral and genuine
the hollow sentiment they have overheard rehearsed in private for their
benefit.

It was not strange therefore that the little people of the Indian Spring
school knew perhaps more of the real relations of Cressy McKinstry to
her admirers than the admirers themselves. Not that this knowledge was
outspoken--for children rarely gossip in the grown-up sense--or even
communicable by words intelligent to the matured intellect. A whisper,
a laugh that often seemed vague and unmeaning, conveyed to each other
a world of secret significance, and an apparently senseless burst of
merriment in which the whole class joined and that the adult critic set
down to "animal spirits"--a quality much more rare with children than
generally supposed--was only a sympathetic expression of some discovery
happily oblivious to older preoccupation. The childish simplicity
of Uncle Ben perhaps appealed more strongly to their sympathy, and
although, for that very reason, they