he precision and gravity of a professional nurse, he felt
strengthened and refreshed.

By-and-by they set out again, and now Joan trotted by Bambo's side,
chattering gaily the while. The sunshine was warm and bright. The air
was alive with myriads of insects flitting and buzzing their brief life
away. Sparrows chirped and wrangled in the bare brown hedges, robins
piped their sweet, plaintive tune from every tree; film-like webs of
silvery gossamer decked the grass beneath their feet, and draped the
stunted furze bushes as with a bridal veil of rarest lace. It was all so
gladsome, so beautiful, so free, that Joan laughed and skipped for joy.
And was she not going back to Miss Carolina, and the cats, and baby, and
Auntie Alice, and Firgrove? Darby trudged more soberly by the dwarf's
side, and they chatted as they went. Bambo told tales of his boyhood. He
described to the children the tiny two-roomed cottage, long since swept
away to be replaced by a more sanitary habitation, where he and his
widowed mother lived with his grandfather and grandmother. He spoke of
his kind grandmother's death, and his mother's, almost immediately
after, from the same destroying fever. Thus Bambo was left practically
alone in the world. His grandfather was a sour, silent man, disappointed
first in his only son, who had never been anything but a ne'er-do-well
and a burden to his parents; then in his grandson, whose deformity and
helplessness the old man resented as a personal injury at the hand of
Providence. He could not tolerate the child as a baby--never set eyes
upon him, in fact, if he could help it. When the baby grew from infancy
to childhood, he quickly learned, guided by the unerring instinct
usually possessed by the young, to keep out of his grandfather's way and
to fear him, so that there was little love lost between them. After the
two women were gone the state of matters grew worse. Sore from a sense
of injustice, starved for want of affection, the boy was often sullen
and sometimes disobedient. Strife and even blows were the outcome, until
life in Moses Green's lodging--for he had quitted the cottage--became
unbearable to the wretched, misguided boy. Indeed, so unhappy did he
feel in those dark days after his mother's death, that he had been often
tempted to wonder why God had made him at all when he was not made as
others, when in all the big, wide world there seemed no fitting place
for such as he.

There were several kind, go