let on to a livin' soul about him drinkin', but she's just as
nice to him as if he was a good man to her."

Pearl listened to this story with sympathetic interest. She had known
this all the time--the beads on the cretonne had told the story.

"And when her little Georgie died, if ever a woman was tried sore it
was her. She sent Bill for the doctor, and he fell in with a
threshin' gang and forgot to come home; yes, and that poor woman was
alone with little George choking with croup. Libby Anne ran over for
me, but he was too far gone. Bill came home in the mornin' so drunk
we couldn't make him understand that the child was dead, and he kept
askin' us all the time how little Georgie was now. I came home in the
mornin' to help to milk, and Martha went over to stay with her.
Martha can't ever forget the sad sight she saw when she went in. Bill
was on the lounge drunk. Little George lay on the bed dead, and she
was sittin' there makin' the shroud, and even then she made excuses
for Bill to Martha, and said he'd been up all night, and was tired."

When Pearl went back into the kitchen she reported progress to Mary.

"She's talkin' kinder now, Mary. The fresh air and the wind through
the trees is beginnin' to tell on her. Give me another cup of tea for
her."

CHAPTER X

THE NEW PUPILS

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Has had elsewhere its setting, and cometh from afar,
Not in entire forgetfulness, not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God--who is our Home.

_----Wordsworth._

WHEN school opened after the Easter holiday, the Watson family began
to attend. It was two miles to the bare little schoolhouse at the
cross-roads. The road lay straight across the prairie, green now with
the tender green of spring, and dotted thick with blue anemones. A
prairie fire, the fall before, had burned away all the old grass, and
so everywhere the country was of the richest dazzling green, varied
only in the shades--the tender, soft green of the young wheat, the
bluish green of the oat-fields, with here and there splendid groves
of poplars, making a scene which, to Pearl's eyes, was of untold
beauty.

Away to the south the Tiger Hills were veiled in blue smoke, as if
some distant prairie fire was raging through the meadows beyond.
Across the long reach of upland pasture--swiftly and almost
noiselessly--swept the m