ool, and Jane was so afraid it would mortify him if she walked
home with him that she always ran ahead with an uncle, urging him to
hurry. "My," she used to say, "he would be too ashamed to hold his head
up again, if I should speak to him on the street." No one knew she felt
this way, and she had been dodging him some years when one morning, over
in the neighboring town, she saw him coming down the steps of a bank
building across the street from her. There was no place to hide, so she
stood there blushing and breathing pretty hard. But he lifted his tall
silk hat to her, smiled, and waved his hand. He looked so pleased to see
her that she never worried any more about meeting him on the street.

Across the road from Jane's house was a nice green common, and beyond
this a narrow path led to her father's mills. He owned two, a flour-mill
and a sawmill. In the sawmill great trees from the Illinois forests
were sawed into lumber. Jane used to sit on a log that was every minute
being drawn nearer the great teeth of the saw and jump off it when she
was within a few inches of the saw.

Jane and the other children had great fun in the flour-mill, too. They
made believe the bins were houses, and down in the basement played on
the tall piles of bran and shorts as they would on sand piles.

Jane's home was pretty and all the stores where she bought candy and
toys were fascinating places. She fancied the whole world was pleasant
and gay. She supposed that everybody in Cedarville had as good a home as
she, until one day she went down in the part of the town where the mill
hands lived. There the houses were shabby and untidy, the children
ragged and dirty. They looked hungry, too. Jane ran home, and when her
father came to dinner she asked him why any one had to live in such a
pitiful way. He could not explain it so that she felt any better about
it. "When I grow up," she declared, "I will build a lovely house right
in the middle of those poor huts, so that the children may have
something beautiful to look at; and I will see that they have clean
clothes and good food."

Only a few Sundays later Jane dashed into her father's room ready for
church. "See my new cloak," she called, "isn't it handsome?"

Her father admired it and then answered: "Yes, it is so much nicer than
any other girl has that it may make some of the poorer ones unhappy.
Perhaps you had better wear your old one."

Jane was a child that could not bear to hurt anot