se owners the money
would have been so useful, and there it had lain unnoticed till it
fluttered out into the very hands of Katie Robertson, who needed it so
much.

What castles in the air the little girl built as she lay there in the
twilight!--dresses and bonnets for her mother; new suits for each of the
boys; a new tea-set, with table-cloth and napkins. Never in the world
did a fifty-dollar bill buy half so much in reality as this one did in
imagination; which, by the way, is a very pleasant way of spending
money, since it does not at all diminish the amount, which may be all
spent over and over again in a variety of ways. But strangely enough,
while everything needed by the others, even to a new ribbon to tie round
pussy's neck, was remembered, Katie's catalogue of articles to be bought
contained nothing in the world for herself.

CHAPTER VII.

STRIFE AND VICTORY.

No thought had as yet suggested itself to Katie concerning her right to
the money which had thus come into her possession, and as she lay there
planning the things she was going to get with it, she enjoyed to the
full the dignity of ownership. How glad her mother would be when there
was a decent water-pail in the house, plates enough of one kind to go
round, and a table-cloth that was not nearly all darns! Then her mother
should have a new shawl and bonnet, and each of the boys a straw hat and
a bright necktie, and she would have something to put in the plate every
Sunday in church, and to add to the missionary collection of the
Sunday-school class. Perhaps, even, she could give something toward a
present that the girls were talking of giving to Miss Eunice.

But just then an idea, so painful that at first she turned away from
it, struck her, and a question that she did not want to answer suggested
itself to her mind. Had she a right to keep the money? Was it really
hers? Of course it was, said inclination; whose else could it be? She
had _found_ it, no one else; if she had not picked it up it would have
gone in with the rags to be boiled and ground up into paper again, or it
might have been swept away among the dust and waste paper, and no one
been the better or wiser. "Findings is keepings" was a familiar
school-boy proverb; was it the right principle or not?

Katie tried to persuade herself that it was. Nevertheless, she was glad
that, as she supposed, no one had seen her find the bill, and that her
mother as yet knew nothing about the f