really hear the clock last night, Auntie?" Pearl asked with
great politeness.

"Oh, it's very little you youngsters know about lying awake. When you
get to the age of me and your mother, I tell you, it's different I
get thinkin', thinkin', thinkin', and my nerves get all unstrung."

"And you really heard the clock?" Pearl said. "My, but that is
queer!"

"Nothin' queer about it, Pearl. What's queer about it, I'd like to
know?"

"Because I stopped the clock," Pearl said, "just to see if you could
hear it when it's stopped," and for once Aunt Kate, usually so ready
of speech, could not think of anything to say.

Aunt Kate went to bed early the next night, leaving the children
undisturbed to enjoy the pleasant hour as they had done before she
came. The next morning she handed Pearl the sheet of brown paper, and
below the list of recommendations there it was in bold writing:

"Kate W. Shenstone."

"See that, now," said Pearl triumphantly, as she showed it to the
children, "what it does for you to know history!"

"Say," said Jim, "where could we get some of them things, what did
you call them, Pearl?"

"'Twouldn't do any good, she wouldn't eat them," Billy said.

"Lampreys or lampwicks, or somethin' like that."

"Now, boys," said Pearl, "that's not right. Don't talk like that. It
ain't cheerful."

CHAPTER IV

SOMETHING MORE THAN GESTURES

Wanting is--what?
Summer redundant,
Blueness abundant.
Where is the blot?

_----Robert Browning._

PEARLIE WATSON, the new caretaker of the Milford school, stood broom
in hand at the back of the schoolroom and listened. Pearlie's face
was troubled. She had finished the sweeping of the other three rooms,
and then, coming into Miss Morrison's room to sweep it, she found
Maudie Ducker rehearsing her "piece" for the Medal Contest. Miss
Morrison was instructing Maudie, and Mrs. Ducker would have told you
that Maudie was doing "beautifully."

Every year the W. C. T. U. gave a silver medal for the best reciter,
and for three consecutive years Miss Morrison had trained the winner;
so Mrs. Ducker was naturally anxious to have Maudie trained by so
successful an instructor. Miss Morrison had studied elocution and
"gesturing." It was in gesturing that Maudie was being instructed
when Pearlie came in with her broom.

It was a pathetic monologue that Miss Morrison had chosen for Maudie,
supposed to be given by an old woman in a poorhouse. Her husband h