d fell when Glory Goldie came along."

"Would that be anything to write about?" asked Katrina, weary of
this senseless talk.

"But suppose Glory Goldie stopped and helped the old lady up?"
pursued the seine-maker, "and she was so thankful to the girl for
helping her that she opened her purse and gave her all of ten
rix-dollars--wouldn't that be worth telling?"

"Why certainly," said Katrina, "if it were true. But this is just
something you're making up."

"It is well, sometimes, to be able to indulge in little thought
feasts," contended the seine-maker, "they are often more satisfying
than the real ones."

"You've tried both kinds," returned Katrina, "so you ought to know."

The seine-maker went his way directly, and Katrina gave no further
thought to his story.

As for Jan, he took it at first as idle chatter. But lying abed,
with nothing to take up his mind, presently he began to wonder if
there was not some hidden meaning back of the seine-maker's words.
The old man's tone sounded a bit peculiar when he spoke of the
letter. Would he have sat there and made up such a long story only
for talk's sake? Perhaps he had heard something. Perhaps Glory
Goldie had written to him? It was quite possible that something so
great had come to the little girl that she dared not send direct
word to her parents, and wrote instead to the seine-maker, asking
him to prepare them.

"He'll come again to-morrow," thought Jan, "and then we'll hear all
about it."

But for some reason the seine-maker did not come back the next day,
nor the day after. By the third day Jan had become so impatient to
see his old friend that he got up and went over to his cabin, to
find out whether there was anything in what he had said.

The old man was sitting alone mending a drag-net when Jan came in.
He was so crippled from rheumatism, he said, he had been unable to
leave the house for several days.

Jan did not want to ask him outright if he had received a letter
from Glory Goldie. He thought he would attain his object more
easily by approaching it in the indirect way the other had taken.
So he said:

"I've been thinking of what you told us about Glory Goldie the last
time you were at our place."

The seine-maker looked up from his work, puzzled. It was some
little time before he comprehended what Jan alluded to. "Why, that
was just a little whimsey of mine," he returned presently.

Then Jan went very close to the old man. "Anyhow it was so