o
get a birch-bark canoe off the shallows than a big ship off the rocks.
Susan Posey's trouble will be come at easily enough; but Myrtle Hazard
floats in deeper water. We must make Susan Posey tell her own story, or
let her tell it, for it will all come out of itself."

* * * * *

"I am going to dust the books in the open shelves this morning. I wonder
if Miss Susan Posey wouldn't like to help for half an hour or so,"
Master Gridley remarked at the breakfast-table.

The amiable girl's very pleasant countenance lighted up at the thought
of obliging the old man who had been so kind to her and so liberal to
her friend, the poet. She would be delighted to help him; she would dust
them all for him, if he wanted her to. No, Master Gridley said, he
always wanted to have a hand in it; and, besides, such a little body as
she was could not lift those great folios out of the lower shelves
without overstraining herself; she might handle the musketry and the
light artillery, but he must deal with the heavy guns himself. "As low
down as the octavos, Susan Posey, you shall govern; below that, the
Salic law."

Susan did not know much about the Salic law; but she knew he meant that
he would dust the big books and she would attend to the little ones.

A very young and a very pretty girl is sometimes quite charming in a
costume which thinks of nothing less than of being attractive. Susan
appeared after breakfast in the study, her head bound with a kerchief of
bright pattern, a little jacket she had outgrown buttoned, in spite of
opposition, close about her up to the throat, round which a white
handkerchief was loosely tied, and a pair of old gauntlets protecting
her hands, so that she suggested something between a gypsy, a jaunty
_soubrette_, and the _fille du regiment_.

Master Gridley took out a great volume from the lower shelf,--a folio in
massive oaken covers with clasps like prison hinges, bearing the stately
colophon, white on a ground of vermilion, of Nicholas Jenson and his
associates. He opened the volume,--paused over its blue and scarlet
initial letter,--he turned page after page, admiring its brilliant
characters, its broad, white marginal rivers, and the narrower white
creek that separated the black-typed twin-columns,--he turned back to
the beginning and read the commendatory paragraph, "_Nam ipsorum omnia
fulgent tum correctione dignissima, tum cura imprimendo splendida ac
miranda_," a