ery sad and unhappy,
but quite sane again.

VIII

During the winter the Poor Boy made two excursions, lasting for a number
of days, southward through his valley and beyond. It was supposed by
Martha, wild with anxiety, and by Miss Joy, but little less so, that he
went alone. As a matter of fact he had companions; Yardsley, the
forester and surveyor; Wangog, the Huron chief, taciturn in talk, but a
great woodsman; and Stephen Bell, a young man recently come to live in
the village and a great favorite with the Poor Boy.

It had developed that there were enough people wrongfully accused of
some crime or other in the world to settle the Poor Boy's lands from the
big lake all the way to the salt sea. And the main object of his long
excursions was to locate upon deep water, navigable for great ships, a
site, not for a village, but for a city.

Already his first village had suburbs, and here and there, dotted about
among the foot-hills, were villas belonging to a wealthier class of
people: Bradleys, Godfreys, Warrens, Warings, etc., families of position
and breeding, among whom was a constant round of little dinners and
dances to which the Poor Boy dearly loved to be invited.

[Illustration: During the winter, the Poor Boy made two excursions
southward through his valley and beyond.]

Government by a commission of three was an established and successful
fact. Though it must be owned that as the man member and the woman
member could never agree about anything, all reins of policy were
gathered into the hands of the child.

"A child leads us," was often in the mouths of the village elders, and
often anxiety expressed as to what would happen when the child grew up.
But that he would grow up was not likely, since he was the very image of
what the Poor Boy himself had been at the same age--a charming,
straightforward, most honorable boy, touched by the fairy godmother of
justice, music, and fancy.

It was wonderful how much the school-children learned with three hours'
schooling a day (except Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday, when they had
none), and how outdoor play the rest of the time was rapidly developing
them physically and in the sense of responsibility and judgment. There
were no recorded cases of weak eyes, nerves, or hysteria. There were no
suicides among the children upon the occasion of failures to pass
examinations.

Nor was morbid curiosity allowed to stalk among them, destroying as it
went. They we