tiful
to hear him then; you'd love it, Miss Betty," and Hannibal smiled up
sweetly into her face.

"Does he have you go to Sunday-school in Raleigh?"

The boy shook his head.

"I ain't got no clothes that's fitten to wear, nor no pennies to give,
but the judge, he 'lows that as soon as he can make a raise I got to
go, and he's learning me my letters--but we ain't a book. Miss Betty, I
reckon it'd stump you some to guess how he's fixed it for me to learn?"

"He's drawn the letters for you, is that the way?" In spite of herself,
Betty was experiencing a certain revulsion of feeling where the judge
and Mahaffy were concerned. They were doubtless bad enough, but they
could have been worse.

"No, ma'am; he done soaked the label off one of Mr. Pegloe's whisky
bottles and pasted it on the wall just as high as my chin, so's I can
see it good, and he's learning me that-a-ways! Maybe you've seen the
kind of bottle I mean--Pegloe's Mississippi Pilot: Pure Corn Whisky?"
But Hannibal's bright little face fell. He was quick to see that the
educational system devised by the judge did not impress Betty at all
favorably. She drew him into her arms.

"You shall have my books--the books I learned to read out of when I was
a little girl, Hannibal!"

"I like learning from the label pretty well," said Hannibal loyally.

"But you'll like the books better, dear, when you see them. I know just
where they are, for I happened on them on a shelf in the library only
the other day."

After they had found and examined the books and Hannibal had grudgingly
admitted that they might possess certain points of advantage over the
label, he and Betty went out for a walk. It was now late afternoon and
the sun was sinking behind the wall of the forest that rose along the
Arkansas coast. Their steps had led them to the terrace where they stood
looking off into the west. It was here that Betty had said good-by to
Bruce Carrington--it might have been months ago, and it was only days.
She thought of Charley--Charley, with his youth and hope and high
courage--unwittingly enough she had led him on to his death! A sob rose
in her throat.

Hannibal looked up into her face. The memory of his own loss was never
very long absent from his mind, and Miss Betty had been the victim of
a similarly sinister tragedy. He recalled those first awful days
of loneliness through which he had lived, when there was no Uncle
Bob--soft-voiced, smiling and infinitely compani