the
property of Arthur.

Just what he meant to do with it he did not know, until Jerrie suggested
that he should make it an asylum for homeless children, who should
receive the kindest and tenderest care from competent and trustworthy
nurses, hired for the purpose.

'Yes, I'll do it,' Arthur said, 'and will call it "The Gretchen Home."
Maybe she will come there some time, and know what I have done.'

This idea once in his mind, Arthur never let go of it until the house
was fitted up with school-rooms and dormitories, with the little white
beds and chairs suggestive of the little ones rescued from want and
misery and placed in the Gretchen home until it would hold no more. The
general supervision of this home was placed in the hands of the English
rector, the Rev. James Dennis, whose many acts of kindness and humanity
among the poor had won for him the sobriquet of St. James, and with whom
the interests of the children were safe as with a loving father.

'There is money enough--money enough,' said Arthur, when giving his
instructions to the matron, a good-natured woman, who, he knew, would
never abuse a child. 'Money enough; to give them something besides bread
and water for breakfast, and mush and molasses for supper. Children like
cookies and custard pie, and if there comes a circus to town let them go
once in a while; it won't hurt them to see a little of the world.'

Frau Hirch looked at him in some surprise, but promised compliance with
his wishes; and when in the middle of December he left Wiesbaden for
Italy he had the satisfaction of knowing that the inmates of the
Gretchen home were enjoying a bill of fare not common in institutions of
the kind.

Another odd fancy had entered his brain, upon which he acted with his
usual promptness. Every child not known to have been baptized, was to be
christened with a new name, either Gretchen, or Jerrie, or Maude or
Arthur, or Harold, or Frank.

'Suppose you have Tom, and Ann Eliza, and Hilly,' Jerrie suggested, and
after a little demur Arthur consented, and the names of Tom, and Ann
Eliza, and Billy were added to the list, which, in the course of time,
created some little confusion in the Gretchen home, where Jerries, and
Maudes, and Harolds, and Arthurs abounded in great profusion, these
being the favorites of the children, who in most instances were allowed
to choose for themselves.

It was not difficult to find in Wiesbaden people who had remembered
Gretchen an