re!--she must and would. He would die, she
knew he would,--and so on.

It was a singular testimony to the evident presence of a human element
in Mr. Bytes Gridley that the poor girl, on her extreme trouble, should
think of him as a counsellor. But the wonderful relenting kind of look
on his grave features as he watched the little twins tumbling about his
great books, and certain marks of real sympathy he had sometimes shown
for her in her lesser woes, encouraged her, and she went straight to his
study, letter in hand. She gave a timid knock at the door of that awful
sanctuary.

"Come in, Susan Posey," was its answer, in a pleasant tone. The old
master knew her light step and the maidenly touch of her small hand on
the panel.

What a sight! 'there were Sossy and Minthy intrenched in a Sebastopol
which must have cost a good half-hour's engineering, and the terrible
Bytes Gridley besieging the fortress with hostile manifestations of the
most singular character. He was actually discharging a large sugar-plum
at the postern gate, which having been left unclosed, the missile would
certainly have reached one of the garrison, when he paused as the door
opened, and the great round spectacles and four wide, staring infants'
eyes were levelled at Miss Susan Posey.

She almost forgot her errand, grave as it was, in astonishment at this
manifestation. The old man had emptied his shelves of half their folios
to build up the fort, in the midst of which he had seated the two
delighted and uproarious babes. There was his Cave's "Historia
Literaria," and Sir Walter Raleigh's "History of the World," and a whole
array of Christian Fathers, and Plato, and Aristotle, and Stanley's book
of Philosophers, with Effigies, and the Junta Galen, and the Hippocrates
of Foesius, and Walton's Polyglot, supported by Father Sanchez on one
side and Fox's "Acts and Monuments" on the other,--an odd collection, as
folios from lower shelves are apt to be.

The besieger discharged his sugar-plum, which was so well aimed that
it fell directly into the lap of Minthy, who acted with it as if the
garrison had been on short rations for some time.

He saw at once, on looking up, that there was trouble. "What now, Susan
Posey, my dear?"

"O Mr. Gridley, I am in such trouble! What shall I do? What shall I do?"

She turned back the name and the bottom of the letter in such a way
that Mr. Gridley could read nothing but the few lines relating their
adventure.