he added mysteriously.

"Where is it?"

"Here! I always carry it here," said the boy, putting his hand to his
breast, where a bulging-out was visible. "This is a model. When it is
done they will have to make a large one."

"Show it me."

The boy shook his head.

"No, not till it is done. I cannot let any human being see it till
then."

"It is a beautiful secret," said Em; and the boy shuffled out to pick up
his skins.

That evening father and son sat in the cabin eating their supper. The
father sighed deeply sometimes. Perhaps he thought how long a time it
was since Bonaparte had visited the cabin; but his son was in that land
in which sighs have no part. It is a question whether it were not better
to be the shabbiest of fools, and know the way up the little stair
of imagination to the land of dreams, than the wisest of men, who see
nothing that the eyes do not show, and feel nothing that the hands do
not touch. The boy chewed his brown bread and drank his coffee; but in
truth he saw only his machine finished--that last something found out
and added. He saw it as it worked with beautiful smoothness; and over
and above, as he chewed his bread and drank his coffee, there was that
delightful consciousness of something bending over him and loving him.
It would not have been better in one of the courts of heaven, where the
walls are set with rows of the King of Glory's amethysts and milk-white
pearls, than there, eating his supper in that little room.

As they sat in silence there was a knock at the door. When it was
opened the small woolly head of a little nigger showed itself. She was
a messenger from Tant Sannie: the German was wanted at once at the
homestead. Putting on his hat with both hands, he hurried off. The
kitchen was in darkness, but in the pantry beyond Tant Sannie and her
maids were assembled.

A Kaffer girl, who had been grinding pepper between two stones, knelt
on the floor, the lean Hottentot stood with a brass candlestick in her
hand, and Tant Sannie, near the shelf, with a hand on each hip, was
evidently listening intently, as were her companions.

"What may be it?" cried the old German in astonishment. The room beyond
the pantry was the storeroom. Through the thin wooden partition there
arose at that instant, evidently from some creature ensconced there, a
prolonged and prodigious howl, followed by a succession of violent blows
against the partition wall.

The German seized the churn-stic