on, and faced their stares and laughter.

One day it struck Francis that he ought not to be eating the old
priest's scanty store of food, which he noticed his kind old friend used
to cook and try and prepare as nicely as possible for him. This was not
what a true lover of poverty should do. "Rise up, thou lazy one," he
said to himself, "and go begging from door to door the leavings of the
table." So, taking a big dish, he went round the houses of the
townspeople asking for scraps. They gave him broken bits of messy old
food, and he returned with his dish full. But when he sat down to supper
he didn't feel at all like eating from that pile of scraps--the very
thought made him feel quite sick. But he was learning to conquer
himself, and by the time the meal was done he felt he had really
accomplished something, and was at last really a poor man and ready to
live on what God's mercy would give him from day to day.

All this time he had been praying a great deal, and learning to know God
very much better. More and more he felt that God meant to use him for
something special--_what_ he did not know.

At last the little grey church was all built up new and strong, and
Francis felt the job Our Lord had given him was done. But as God had not
shown him anything else to do, he set out and found another tumble-down
little church to build up, and started on that. When that, too, was
finished, he started on a third one. The third one had been restored,
and a service was being held in it for the first time since its
restoration, and Francis was assisting at this service, when something
happened which sent him on a new adventure, and which proved to be the
beginning of the great adventure which filled all the rest of his life.

* * * * *

"That's a good stop," said Akela. "If we started on St. Francis's next
adventure, we could not finish it before you all fell asleep. So we will
keep it for to-morrow night. To-morrow you will hear how the boy Francis
turns into the man St. Francis, and what a wonderful life of service and
suffering for God he begins to have, and how he ends in becoming a great
Saint, and one of the greatest leaders of men."

THE SIXTH DAY

The splashing sound of Cubs making good use of soap and water; snatches
of cheerful song; the lamentation of someone who had lost the "relation"
of his left sand-shoe; the sound of a Sixer trying to make a sleepy-head
turn out--all the