t direct from Bobby Burns."

"Then it's right," came a smothered voice from beneath James' bandage.

"James is of Scottish descent and he confirms this statement, so we can
go ahead and be perfectly sure that we're doing the correct thing. Of
course, we all want to know the future and particularly whatever we can
about the person we're going to marry, so that's what we're going to try
to find out at the very start off."

"Take off my bandage," cried Dicky. "I know the perthon I'm going to
marry."

A shout of laughter greeted this assertion from the six-year-old.

"Who is it, Dicky?" asked Helen, her arm around his shoulders.

"I'm going to marry Mary," he asserted stoutly.

There was a renewed peal at this, and Roger went on with his
instructions.

"I'll lead you two by two to the kitchen door and then you'll go down
the flight of steps and straight ahead for anywhere from ten to twenty
steps. That will land you right in the middle of what the frost has left
of the Morton garden. When you get there you'll 'pull kale'."

"Meaning?" inquired George Foster.

"Meaning that you'll feel about until you find a stalk of cabbage and
pull it up."

"I don't like cabbage," complained Tom Watkins.

"You'll like this because it will give you a lot of information. If it's
long or short or fat or thin your future husband or wife will correspond
to it."

"That's the most unromantic thing I ever heard," exclaimed Margaret
Hancock. "I certainly hope my future husband won't be as fat as a
cabbage!"

"You can tell how great a fortune he's going to have--or she--by the
amount of earth that clings to the stem."

"Watch me pull mine so g-e-n-t-l-y that not a grain of sand slips off,"
said Tom.

"If you've got courage enough to bite the stem you can find out with
perfect accuracy whether your beloved will have a sweet disposition or
the opposite."

"In any case he'd have a disposition like a cabbage," insisted Margaret,
who did not like cabbage any more than Tom did.

"Ready?" Roger marshalled his little army. "Two by two. Doctor and Ethel
Blue, Tom and Dorothy, James and Helen, George and Ethel Brown, Gregory
and Margaret. Come on, Della," and he led the way through the kitchen
where Mary and the cook were hugely entertained by the procession.

With cries and stumbling they went forth into the cabbage patch, where
they all possessed themselves of stalks which they straightway brought
in to the light of the jack-o'-lant