Radbourn helped Lily out into the midst of the eager little scholars,
who swarmed upon her like bees on a lump of sugar, till even
Radbourn's gravity gave way, and he smiled into her lifted eyes--an
unusual smile, that strangely enough stopped the smile on her own
lips, filling her face with a wistful shadow, and her breath came hard
for a moment and she trembled.

She loved that cold, stern face, oh, so much! and to have him smile
was a pleasure that made her heart leap till she suffered a smothering
pain. She turned to him to say:--

"I am very thankful, Mr. Radbourn, for another pleasant ride," adding
in a lower tone, "It was a very great pleasure; you always give me so
much. I feel stronger and more hopeful."

"I'm glad you feel so. I was afraid I was prosy with my
land-doctrine."

"Oh no! Indeed no! You have given me a new hope; I am exalted with the
thought; I shall try to think it all out and apply it."

And so they parted, the children looking on and slyly whispering among
themselves. Radbourn looked back after awhile but the bare little hive
had absorbed its little group, and was standing bleak as a tombstone
and hot as a furnace on the naked plain in the blazing sun.

"America's pitiful boast!" said the young radical looking back at it.
"Only a miserable hint of what it might be."

All that forenoon as Lily faced her little group of barefoot children,
she was thinking of Radbourn, of his almost fierce sympathy for these
poor supine farmers, hopeless, and in some cases content in their
narrow lives. The children almost worshipped the beautiful girl who
came to them as a revelation of exquisite neatness and taste,--whose
very voice and intonation awed them.

They noted (unconsciously, of course,) every detail. Snowy linen,
touches of soft color, graceful lines of bust and side--the slender
fingers that could almost speak, so beautifully flexile were they.
Lily herself sometimes, when she shook the calloused, knotted,
stiffened hands of the women, shuddered with sympathetic pain, to
think that the crowning wonder and beauty of God's world should be so
maimed and distorted from its true purpose.

Even in the children before her she could see the inherited results
of fruitless labor--and more pitiful yet in the bent shoulders of the
older ones she could see the beginnings of deformity that would soon
be permanent. And as these things came to her, she clasped the poor
wondering things to her side with