ve to be satisfied with your
mother, Polly; Pawliney doesn't care anything about you now.'

Pauline laughed bitterly to herself.

'A frilled peacock, with a ten-dollar outfit!'

She began the interminable pinafores. The sun swept up the horizon and
laughed at her so broadly through the open window that her cheeks grew
flushed and uncomfortable.

Lemuel burst into the room in riotous distress with a bruised knee, the
result of his attempt to imitate the Prodigal Son, which had ended in an
ignominious head-over-heels tumble into the midst of his swinish
friends. This caused a delay, for he had to be hurried out to the back
stoop and divested of garments as odorous, if not as ragged, as those of
his prototype. Then he must be immersed in a hot bath, his knee bound
up, reclothed in a fresh suit, and comforted with bread and molasses.

She toiled wearily on. The room grew almost unbearable as her
step-mother made up the fire preparatory to cooking the noontide meal,
and Polly wailed dismally from her cot. The youthful Prodigal appeared
again in the doorway, his ready tears had made miniature deltas over
his molasses-begrimed countenance, his lower lip hung down in an
impotent despair.

'What's the matter now, Lemuel?'

'I want my best shoes, an' a wing on my finger, an' the axe to kill the
fatted calf.'

Would the basket never be empty? Her head began to throb, and she felt
as if her body were an ache personified. The mingled odours of corned
beef and cabbage issued from one of the pots and permeated the freshly
ironed clothes. She drew a long, deep breath of disgust. At least in
Boston she would be free from the horrors of 'boiled dinner.'

* * * * *

Her scanty wardrobe was finished at last, and she stood waiting for
Abraham Lincoln and the spring waggon to carry her to the station. A
strange tenderness towards her old environment came over her, as she
stood on the threshold of the great unknown. She looked lovingly at the
cows, lazily chewing their cud in the sunshine; she felt sorry for her
step-mother, as she strove to woo slumber to Polly's wakeful eyes with
the same lullaby which had done duty for the whole six; she even found
it in her heart to kiss Lemuel, who, with his ready talent for the
unusual, was busily cramming mud paste into the seams of the little
trunk which held her worldly all. She looked at it with contemptuous
pity.

'You poor old thing! You'll feel as smal