icated by the bundle of evening papers hugged under one
arm.

"Well, Johnnie; what did you find out?" she asked.

"Ain't had time," said the boy. "But he ain't no milyunaire
lumber-shooter, I'll bet a nickel. I sold him a pape' jes' now, down by
Dutchie's lumber yard, and I ast him what kind o' lumber that was in the
pile by the gate. He didn't know, no more'n a goat."

Miss Margery filliped a coin in the air and the newsboy caught it
dexterously.

"That will do nicely for a beginning, Johnnie," she said sweetly. "Come
and see me every once in a while, and perhaps there'll be more little
white cart-wheels for you. Only don't tell; and don't let him catch you.
That's all."

XXIV

THE FORWARD LIGHT

During the days which followed his setting up of the standard of
independence in Mrs. Holcomb's second-floor front, Griswold found
himself entering upon a new world--a world corresponding with gratifying
fidelity to that prefigured future which he had struck out in the waking
hours of his first night on the main-deck of the _Belle Julie_.

Wahaska, as a fortunate field for the post-graduate course in
Experimental Humanity, was all that his fancy had pictured it. It was
neither so small as to scant the variety of subjects, nor so large as to
preclude the possibility of grasping them in their entirety. In strict
accord with the forecast, it promised to afford the writing craftsman's
happy medium in surroundings: it would reproduce, in miniature, perhaps,
but none the less in just proportions, the social problems of the wider
world; and for a writer's seclusion the village quiet of upper Shawnee
Street was all that could be desired.

When he came to go about in the town, as he did daily after the pleasant
occupation of refurnishing his study and bed-room was a pleasure past,
he found that in some mysterious manner his fame had preceded him.
Everybody seemed to know who he was; to be able to place him as a New
Yorker, as an author in search of health, or local color or environment
or some other technical quality not to be found in the crowded cities;
to be able to place him, also, as Miss Margery Grierson's friend and
beneficiary--which last, he surmised, was his best passport to the good
graces of his fellow-townsmen.

Coincidently he discovered that, in the same mysterious manner,
everybody seemed to know that he was, in the Wahaskan phrase,
"well-fixed." Here, again, he guessed that something might be credi