s always--and
be your real aunt?"

"Great snakes!" said Jims, transformed in a second. "Is there any
chance of _that_?"

"There is a certainty, thanks to you," said Uncle Walter. "You can go
over to see her for a little while. Don't talk her to death--she's
weak yet--and attend to that menagerie of yours over there--she's
worrying because the bull dog and gobbler weren't fed--and Jims--"

But Jims had swung down through the pine and was tearing across the
Garden of Spices.

The Girl and the Photograph

When I heard that Peter Austin was in Vancouver I hunted him up. I had
met Peter ten years before when I had gone east to visit my father's
people and had spent a few weeks with an uncle in Croyden. The Austins
lived across the street from Uncle Tom, and Peter and I had struck up
a friendship, although he was a hobbledehoy of awkward sixteen and I,
at twenty-two, was older and wiser and more dignified than I've ever
been since or ever expect to be again. Peter was a jolly little round
freckled chap. He was all right when no girls were around; when they
were he retired within himself like a misanthropic oyster, and was
about as interesting. This was the one point upon which we always
disagreed. Peter couldn't endure girls; I was devoted to them by the
wholesale. The Croyden girls were pretty and vivacious. I had a score
of flirtations during my brief sojourn among them.

But when I went away the face I carried in my memory was not that of
any girl with whom I had walked and driven and played the game of
hearts.

It was ten years ago, but I had never been quite able to forget that
girl's face. Yet I had seen it but once and then only for a moment. I
had gone for a solitary ramble in the woods over the river and, in a
lonely little valley dim with pines, where I thought myself alone, I
had come suddenly upon her, standing ankle-deep in fern on the bank of
a brook, the late evening sunshine falling yellowly on her uncovered
dark hair. She was very young--no more than sixteen; yet the face and
eyes were already those of a woman. Such a face! Beautiful? Yes, but I
thought of that afterward, when I was alone. With that face before my
eyes I thought only of its purity and sweetness, of the lovely soul
and rich mind looking out of the great, greyish-blue eyes which, in
the dimness of the pine shadows, looked almost black. There was
something in the face of that child-woman I had never seen before and
was destined