out the yellow cat's neck, and bought a derelict piano upon
which her heart had been set for many months. She was no musician, but
she loved a tightly closed piano with a scarf draped over the top, and
thought that no parlor should be without one. Up to middle C, as
Aladdin in time found out, the piano in question was not without musical
pretensions, but above that any chord sounded like a nest of tin plates
dropped on a wooden floor, and the intervals were those of no known
scale nor fragment thereof. But in time he learned to draw pleasant
things from the old piano and to accompany his shrill voice in song. As
a matter of fact, he had no voice and never would have, but almost from
the first he knew how to sing. It so happened that he was drawn to the
piano by a singular thing: a note from his beloved.

It came one morning thumb-marked about the sealing, and covered with the
generous sprawl of her writing. It said:

DEAR ALADDIN: Do not say anything about this because I do not know if my
father would like it but I am so sorry about your father blowing up and
all your troubles and I want you to know how sory I am. I must stop now
because I have to practis.

Your loving friend

MARGARET ST. JOHN.

Aladdin was an exquisite speller, and the first thing he noticed about
the letter was that it contained two words spelled wrong, and that he
loved Margaret the better by two misspelled words, and that he had a
lump in his throat.

He had found the letter by his plate at breakfast, and the eyes of Mrs.
Brackett fastened upon it.

"I don't know who ken have been writin' to you," she said.

"Neither do I," said Aladdin, giving, as is proper, the direct lie to
the remark inquisitive. He had put the letter in his pocket.

"Why don't you open it and see?"

Aladdin blushed.

"Time enough after breakfast," he said.

There was a silence.

"Jack's eatin' his breakfast; why ain't you eatin' yours?"

Aladdin fell upon his breakfast for the sake of peace. And Mrs. Brackett
said no more. Some days later, for she was not to be denied in little
matters or great, Mrs. Brackett found where Aladdin had hidden the
letter, took it up, read it, sniffed, and put it back, with the remark
that she never "see such carryin's-on."

Aladdin hid, and read his letter over and over; then an ominous silence
having informed him that Mrs. Brackett had gone abroad, he stole into
the parlor, perched on the piano-