ong for a walk. Now, you children, go right back
there, do you hear me?" For the primary grade had overflowed and was
flooding the halls. And Madame swept them back and slammed her door.

When school was dismissed and the last noisy youngster had gone
storming forth Helen went down the hall to her friend's room. Madame
came swaying out carrying a bunch of gay spiked gladiolus, her
draperies floating about her with cherubs peeping from their folds,
like a saint in an old picture.

She dismissed her satellites firmly at the first corner, except those
who lived beyond or on Willow Lane, a ceremony that necessitated a
great deal of shooing and scolding.

The first eye-sore on Willow Lane was the old hotel, still standing
there, forlorn and ugly, as though ashamed of all the evil it had
wrought.

As the years passed there was always a new generation of loungers to
sit and smoke and spit on its sagging veranda. From it ran the old
high board fence plastered with ugly advertisements of soap or circus
or patent medicine. It disfigured the whole street and shut off a
possible glimpse of the lake. Away on the other side of it was a
meadow where in spring-time the larks soared and sang, and beyond it
the lake and the woods where the mocking bird and the bee made music.
But here in Willow Lane was neither sound nor sight that was pleasant.

The street consisted of a single sorry-looking row of houses with
narrow box-like yards shoved up close to the road, as though there were
not acres and acres of open free meadow land behind them. The hills
upon which Algonquin was situated ceased abruptly here, and the land
spread away in a flat plain along the lake shore. The ground was low
and damp, and every house in Willow Lane that had the misfortune to
possess a cellar was the abode of disease. A deep ditch ran parallel
to the rickety board side-walk. There had just been a week of
unceasing rain and it was full of green water.

"Oh dear!" said Helen, in distress. "I had no idea there was such a
place as this in Algonquin."

"People have lived here for years and still seem to have no idea," said
Madame. She paused and looked back. "Do you see that house 'way up on
the hill yonder? The one with the tower sticking up between the trees?
That's Alexander Graham's mansion. And he makes a good deal of his
money out of the rents of these houses, and nobody seems to care very
much. The people of the churches send down turke