mething? I forget exactly what."

John smiled. He had recovered a little from his embarrassment.

"Why, old Mr. Hunt refuses to pay his taxes every year; but they make
him do it, just the same."

The girls laughed.

"Oh, but John Hampden protested against a great act of tyranny," said
Margaret. "He must have been very brave to do it, or Gray wouldn't have
put him in his poem."

"Such a lovely poem!" sighed Miss Kirke. "I've heard that the author was
seven years writing it."

"Seven years!" John echoed. "Well!"

"He kept pruning it, and re-writing some of the verses," Margaret
explained. "He wanted to make it a perfect poem."

"It's very fine," said John. Then he added, blushingly, "If I had any
fields to keep tyrants away from, I'd like to be a village Hampden
myself, even if I couldn't become famous like the other one."

"Oh, I don't think one need take that line of the poem literally," said
Margaret. "I like to have poetry suggest things to me that are not found
in the mere words. That is why I'm so fond of Shakespeare--he admits of
so many interpretations. Perhaps," she went on, softly and timidly, "if
we keep the little tyrants of selfishness and wickedness away from our
hearts, we can all become village Hampdens. Such things are often harder
to drive away than human tyrants--don't you think so?"

"Yes," replied John, gravely, "I'm sure it is true--though I've had no
contests with human tyrants."

"I know what _my_ greatest tyrant is," said Celia Kirke, who had grown
serious with the others; "and whenever I see him trying to get into my
fields," she added, more lightly, "I shall 'off with his head' with
scant ceremony."

As John walked home alone in the frosty night, he vowed half aloud to
the silent, listening stars that he _would_ be a "village Hampden," that
the tyrant within him should be laid low for all time.

John had no need to mention the tyrant by name--he knew very well that
it was Carelessness with a capital C. How often had this little tyrant
brought him into trouble, and how often had his employer warned him to
break his bad habit before it was too late.

What a pleasant, sensible girl Margaret Shirley was--not a bit spoiled
by her studies in Boston!

Matilda Haines would have laughed more and talked more, but she would
never have given a second thought to the poem they had just read. John
was rather glad she had walked home with some one else that
evening--even though his old tyrant