ll redeem its worth.
Give thy love freely; do not count the cost;
So beautiful a thing was never lost
In the long run.

_----Ella Wheeler Wilcox._

THOMAS PERKINS was astonished beyond words. Martha had asked for
money! The steady, reliable, early-to-bed, early-to-rise Martha--the
only one of his family that was really like his own people. If he
could believe his senses, Martha had asked for two dollars in cash,
and had distinctly said that due bills on the store would not do!

If Martha had risen from her cradle twenty-five years ago and banged
her estimable parent in the eye with her small pink fist, he could
not have been more surprised than he was now! He stared at her with
all this in his face, and Martha felt the ground slipping away from
her. Maybe she shouldn't have asked for it!

She went over the argument again. "It's for a magazine Mrs. Cavers
lent me. I would like to get it every month--it's--it's got lots of
nice things in it." She did not look at her father as she said this.

Thomas Perkins moistened his lips.

"By George!" he said. "You youngsters never think how the money
comes. You seem to think it grows on bushes!"

Martha might have said that spring frost must have nipped the buds
for the last twenty-five years, but she did not. Ready speech was not
one of Martha's accomplishments, so she continued to pleat her apron
into a fan and said nothing.

"Here the other day didn't I send thirty-nine dollars into Winnipeg
to get things for the house, and didn't I get you an eighteen-dollar
wallaby coat last year, and let you wear it week days and all, and
never said a word?"

Martha might have reminded him that she was watering and feeding the
stock, and saving the wages of a hired man, while she was wearing the
wallaby coat, but she said not a word.

"You get a queer old lot more than I got when I was a young shaver,
let me tell you. I've often told you young ones how I left home, when
I was nine years old, with the wind in my back--that's all I got from
home--and with about enough clothes on me to flag a train with. There
wasn't any of these magazines then, and I don't know as they do any
good, anyway. Poor old Ann Winters sent away her good, hard-earned
dollar to some place in the States, where they said: 'Send us a
dollar, and we'll show you how to make fifty; light employment; will
not have to leave home; either ladies or gentlemen can do it.' She
saw this in a magazine a