d to Tutti who was lying, worn out with grief, upon the
doorstep.

"Come, my Tutti," she said, "there are only us two now. We must try
and be very good to each other."

* * * * *

Years afterwards, Tutti, coming home on leave--for he had clung to his
childish idea of being a soldier--found the broken _fiasco_ in the
corner where his grandmother had hidden it; and taking out the beans
that had been lying there so long, he carried them to a little grave
with a small white cross at the head of it.

"Dear Tuttu! He would like to have these growing round him," he
thought, and planted them carefully amongst the flowers and grasses.

Grandmother Maddalena was too old to move out of the house now, but
Father Giacomo watered the beans lovingly, and in the soft spring air
they grew rapidly, so that they soon formed a beautiful tangle, hiding
the cross and even the name that still stood there clearly in black
letters

"TUTTU."

THE STONE-MAIDEN.

Atven was the son of a fisherman, and lived with his father on a flat
sandy coast far away in the North-land.

Great rocks strewed the shore about their hut, and the child had often
been told how, long, long ago, the giant Thor fought single-handed
against a shipload of wild men who attempted to land in the little
bay; and drove them off--killing some, and changing others into the
wonderful stones that remained there to that day.

The country people called them "Thor's balls;" and Atven often
wandered about amongst them, trying to find likenesses to the old
warriors in their weather-worn surfaces; and peering into every hole
and cranny--half dreading, half hoping to see a stone hand stretched
out to him from the misty shadows of the past.

Here and there, a row of smaller boulders lay half sunk in the sand,
with only their rounded tops, covered with long brown seaweed,
appearing above the surface.

These, Atven decided, must be the heads of the ancient Norsemen, and
further on stood their huge mis-shapen bodies, twisted into every
imaginable form, and covered by myriads of shell-fish, that clung to
their grey sides like suits of shining armour.

Atven was often lonely; for he had no brothers or sisters, and his
mother had died many years before. He was a shy, wild boy--more at
home with the sea birds that flew about the lonely shore, than with
the children he met sometimes as he wandered about the country; but in
spite of his shyness