erful society of her mates and
sought a safe solitude in the woods, returning after a time with a
jocund smile on her smug face.

After one of these private luncheons Rebecca had been tempted beyond
her strength, and when Minnie took her seat among them asked, "Is your
headache better, Minnie? Let me wipe off that strawberry jam over your
mouth."

There was no jam there as a matter of fact, but the guilty Minnie's
handkerchief went to her crimson face in a flash.

Rebecca confessed to Emma Jane that same afternoon that she felt
ashamed of her prank. "I do hate her ways," she exclaimed, "but I'm
sorry I let her know we 'spected her; and so to make up, I gave her
that little piece of broken coral I keep in my bead purse; you know the
one?"

"It don't hardly seem as if she deserved that, and her so greedy,"
remarked Emma Jane.

"I know it, but it makes me feel better," said Rebecca largely; "and
then I've had it two years, and it's broken so it wouldn't ever be any
real good, beautiful as it is to look at."

The coral had partly served its purpose as a reconciling bond, when one
afternoon Rebecca, who had stayed after school for her grammar lesson
as usual, was returning home by way of the short cut. Far ahead, beyond
the bars, she espied the Simpson children just entering the woodsy bit.
Seesaw was not with them, so she hastened her steps in order to secure
company on her homeward walk. They were speedily lost to view, but when
she had almost overtaken them she heard, in the trees beyond, Minnie
Smellie's voice lifted high in song, and the sound of a child's
sobbing. Clara Belle, Susan, and the twins were running along the path,
and Minnie was dancing up and down, shrieking:--

"'What made the sleigh love Simpson so?'
The eager children cried;
'Why Simpson loved the sleigh, you know,'
The teacher quick replied."

The last glimpse of the routed Simpson tribe, and the last Rutter of
their tattered garments, disappeared in the dim distance. The fall of
one small stone cast by the valiant Elijah, known as "the fighting
twin," did break the stillness of the woods for a moment, but it did
not come within a hundred yards of Minnie, who shouted "Jail Birds" at
the top of her lungs and then turned, with an agreeable feeling of
excitement, to meet Rebecca, standing perfectly still in the path, with
a day of reckoning plainly set forth in her blazing eyes.

Minnie's face was not pleasant to see, for a cow