erhanging brows.

Then he fumbled in his pocket and brought something out--it was the
sixpence. Then he began talking. Patience could not have told what he
said. Her mind was entirely full of what she had to say. Somehow
she stammered out the story: how she had been afraid to go to Nancy
Gookin's, and how she had lost the sixpence her uncle had given her,
and how Martha had said she told a fib. Patience trembled and gasped
out the words, and curtesied, once in a while, when the Squire said
something.

"Come here," said he, when he had sat for a minute or two, taking in
the facts of the case.

To Patience's utter astonishment, Squire Bean was laughing, and
holding out the sixpence.

"Have you got the palm-leaf string?"

"Yes, sir," replied Patience, curtesying.

"Well, you may take this home, and put in the palm-leaf string, and
use it for a marker in your book--but don't you spend it again."

"No, sir." Patience curtesied again.

"You did very wrong to spend it, very wrong. Those sixpences are not
given to you to spend. But I will overlook it this once."

The Squire extended the sixpence. Patience took it, with another dip
of her little skirt. Then he turned around to his desk.

Patience waited a few minutes. She did not know whether she was
dismissed or not. Finally the Squire begun to add aloud: "Five and
five are ten," he said, "ought, and carry the one."

He was adding a bill. Then Patience stole out softly. Mrs. Squire Bean
was waiting in the kitchen. She gave her a great piece of plum-cake
and kissed her.

"He didn't hurt you any, did he?" said she.

"No, ma'am," said Patience, looking with a bewildered smile at the
sixpence.

That night she tied in the palm-leaf strand again, and she put the
sixpence in her Geography-book, and she kept it so safely all her life
that her great-grandchildren have seen it.

A PLAIN CASE.

Willy had his own little bag packed--indeed it had been packed for
three whole days--and now he stood gripping it tightly in one hand,
and a small yellow cane which was the pride of his heart in the other.
Willy had a little harmless, childish dandyism about him which his
mother rather encouraged. "I'd rather he'd be this way than the
other," she said when people were inclined to smile at his little
fussy habits. "It won't hurt him any to be nice and particular, if he
doesn't get conceited."

Willy looked very dainty and sweet and gentle as he stood in the door
t