profit to be made only from
the fear that people have of him as they have of Regan.

At evening when he makes bold to stroll through the yards among the
roadmen some tale of Regan will send him scurrying back light-hearted to
the old terminal to count his money, hidden in a can behind some loose
bricks in the wall.

"Buy and sell and trample them all, I will, some day," he says, and
dances a banshee dance with shuffling feet and flinging arms. The
spiders--who are all misers--glare down on him with a poison joy, and
hasten to spin a web over the cranny where the can of treasure is
buried. "No thief will suspect what is hidden there now," says Tim; and
opens another deposit in another cranny, where a spider with golden
spots mounts guard. But the mice having set their nests in order only
look on at all this, so as not to take their part in his history before
it is time.

Drafty and echoing and chill the old terminal is that same night, and
for the first time the boy sitting cross-legged with his tattered toga
of old sacks wrapped round him is aware of the loneliness. In a sort of
vision a cozy room with sparkling hearth rises to mind, and the old
woman welcoming him on the snowy doorstep; the hard lines at the corners
of his mouth melt away, a dimple coming into the brown cheek, which had
never known dimple before, and he curses softly with a gleam of white
teeth.

"Sure, the old dame had a message to send, and I could have carried it,"
he muses; "because," he admits uneasily, "'t was a promise."

And hereupon by the arrangement of Destiny the mice having all in order
take their cue and come out boldly into his history. In the corner along
of Tim is a rubbish of old records upon which he has thrown the package
brought from Molly's cottage--thrown it the first evening of his
coming, with no thought of it since, being preoccupied with the business
of pull-down and trample-under. But now the mice gnawing at the string
open the package, and the little bottle of ink comes rolling across the
floor directly before his eyes. And this appearance of the ink bottle
being so timed to his mood the boy reaches for the rest of the package
and laying aside the pen unfolds the sheets of paper.

One of them he examines curiously, placing it between his elbows under
the lantern as he stretches flat on the floor. He knows very well 't is
Molly's beginning of the message of the Farthest Lantern, and though he
is not an educated perso