is
big enough to be of any use."

"I think that would be very nice and I shall ask grandfather to be sure
to take him. Do you like it here?"

"Oh, yes, I like it. Amanda is awful pernickity sometimes, but I just
love your grandmother and it is a heap sight better than being hungry
and cold."

"Would you have to stay supposing you didn't like it?" Edna was
determined to get all the particulars.

"I suppose so; I'd have to stay till I was eighteen; I'm bound to do
that."

Edna reflected. "I suppose that is what it means by being bound; you
are just bound to stay. I wonder if anyone else was ever named
Reliance," she went on, being much interested to hear something about so
peculiar a name.

"My grandmother was, her that your grandmother knew."

"Oh, was she? Then you are named after your grandmother just as my
sister Celia is named Cecelia after hers. Yours is a funny name, isn't
it? I don't mean funny exactly, for I think it is quite pretty, but I
never knew of anyone named that."

"I don't mind it when I get it all, but when my brothers called me Li I
didn't like it. Your grandmother gives me the whole name, and I am glad
she does; but she said they generally used to call my grandmother Lyley
when she was a little girl."

"I think that is rather pretty, too, don't you?"

"Yes, but I like the whole name better."

"Then I will always call you by the whole name," Edna assured her. "Can
you tell stories, Reliance?"

"Do you mean fibs or reading stories like--let's see--Cinderella and
Jack and the Beanstalk?"

"Oh, I mean the Cinderella kind; I'd hate to think you told fibs."

"I can tell 'em, but I guess I don't care to. I know two or three of the
other kind and Bible stories, some of them: Eli and Samuel, and David
and Goliath, and all those."

"Do you go to school?"

"Half the year, but I guess I won't be going very much longer. I'll soon
be going on fourteen; I'll stop when I'm fifteen."

"Oh, shall you? Then what will you do?"

"I'll learn to housekeep and cook, and to sew and all that. Mrs. Willis
says it is more important for me to be educated in the useful things,
that I'll get along better if I am, and I guess she is right. My mother
couldn't cook worth a cent and she just hated it, so we didn't get very
good vittles."

"Was it your mother's mother after whom you were named?"

"No, my father's mother. The Fairmans lived around here, but there ain't
many of them left now. My father was an