tha had never heard of unrequited love. The only books she had
read were the Manitoba Readers as far as Book IV, and they are
noticeably silent on the affairs of the heart. In the gossip of the
neighbourhood she had heard of girls making "a dead set for fellows
who did not care a row of pins" for them, and she knew it was not
considered a nice thing for any girl to do; but it came to her now
clearly that it was not a subject for mirth, and she wondered why any
person found it so.

As for Martha herself, the tricks of coquetry were foreign to her,
unless flaky biscuits and snowy bread may be so called; and so, day
by day, she went on baking, scrubbing, and sewing, taking what
happiness she could out of dreams, sweet, vanishing dreams.

CHAPTER II

THE RISING WATSONS

There is ever a song somewhere, my dear,
There is ever a something sings alway:
There's a song of the lark when the skies are clear
And the song of the thrush when the skies are gray.

_----James Whitcomb Riley._

WHILE Martha Perkins was weaving sweet fancies to beguile the tedium
of her uneventful life, a very different scene was being enacted, a
few miles away, in the humble home of John Watson, C. P. R.
section-man, in the little town of Millford, where he and his wife
and family of nine were working out their own destiny. Mrs. Watson up
to this time had spent very few of the daylight hours at home, having
a regular itinerary among some of the better homes of the town, where
she did half-day stands at the washtub, with, a large grain sack
draped around her portly person, while the family at home brought
themselves up in whatever way seemed best to them.

One day the fortunes of the Watson family suddenly changed, and in
such a remarkable way it would convince the most sceptical of the
existence of good working fairies. A letter came to Pearl, the eldest
girl, from the Old Country, and the letter contained money!

When it became known in the community that Pearl Watson had received
a magnificent gift of money from the parents of the young Englishman
she had nursed while she was working for Mrs. Sam Motherwell, it
created no small stir in the hearts of those who had to do with other
young Englishmen. Parents across the sea, rolling in ancestral gold
and Bank of England notes, acquired a reality they had never enjoyed
before. The young chore boy who was working for five dollars a month
at George Steadman's never knew why M