roversy that
might easily have become a police matter.

"You're a liar if you say you said all that to me!" shouted the burly
Butcher Myers. "You never opened your head, you shrimp! Bawling me out
in the papers and losing me my best customers! Whaddye mean?"

Back came the retort from Jacob Downey with the snarl of a little
creature at bay.

"If I didn't say it to you then, you big lobster, I say it to you now.
All that the paper says I said I say. What'll you do about it?"

"Hah! You!" Myers snapped his fingers in Downey's fiery face and
turned away.

Miss Lance's path to the Hilldale School next morning took her past
three post-boxes. Into the third she dropped a note that she had
carried from home. Mr. Sloan would find her message exceedingly brief,
although (or, perhaps, because) she had spent hours in composing it.

DEAR SIR:

I regret to discover that you lack moral principles.

ANGELINA LANCE.

Just before the last bell the janitor brought in a prisoner for her
custody. Willie Downey's head was bloody but unbowed; three
seventh-graders he had vanquished in one round. "They guyed me," said
he. "They called me a Nawthour."

Morning prayer and song waited while teacher and pupil spoke earnestly
of many things; while the teacher's eyes filled with tears, and the
pupil's heart filled with high resolve to bring home the baseball
championship of the Ashland Public School League and lay it at Miss
Angelina's feet, or perish in the attempt.

V

The A. Lincoln Wilbram prize went to a small boy named Aaron Levinsky
whose English was 99 per cent. pure. Little Aaron's essay was printed
as the centre-piece in Wilbram, Prescott & Co.'s page in the _Bee_;
little Aaron invested his gold in thrift-stamps, and the tumult and
the shouting died.

Miss Angelina Lance sat alone every evening of the week. True, Mr.
Sloan had tried to right the wrong; he had called Miss Angelina on the
telephone, which he should have known was an inadequate thing to do;
he had also sent a ten-dollar bank-note to Willie, in care of Miss
Lance at the Hilldale School, together with his warm felicitations
upon Willie's success as a _litterateur_. Did Willie know that his
fine first effort had been reprinted, with proper credit, in the great
New York _Planet_?

True, too, the illustrious D.K.T. had written Miss Angelina an abject
apology, most witty and poetic, taking all the blame to himself and