dge of
oratory. Has decided many contests at Concord, the home of Emerson."

"Concord, New Hampshire," I corrected; but neither lady heard me.

"How splendid for Leola!" cried Mrs. Mattern, instantly. "Leola! Oh,
Leola! Come right out here!"

Mrs. Jeffries has been more prompt. She was already in her house, and
now came from it, bringing a pleasant-looking boy of sixteen, it
might be. The youth grinned at me as he stood awkwardly, brought in
shirtsleeves from the performance of some household work.

"This is Guy," said his mother. "Guy took the prize last year. Guy
hopes--"

"Shut up, mother," said Guy, with entire sweetness. "I don't hope
twice--"

"Twice or a dozen times should raise no hard feelings if my son is
Sharon's best speaker," cried Mrs. Jeffries, and looked across the fence
viciously.

"Shut up, mother; I ain't," said Guy.

"He is a master of humor recitations," his mother now said to me.
"Perhaps you know, or perhaps you do not know, how high up that is
reckoned."

"Why, mother, Leola can speak all around me. She can," Guy added to me,
nodding his head confidentially.

I did not believe him, I think because I preferred his name to that of
Leola.

"Leola will study in Paris, France," announced Mrs. Mattern, arriving
with her child. "She has no advantages here. This is the gentleman,
Leola."

But before I had more than noted a dark-eyed maiden who would not look
at me, but stood in skirts too young for her figure, black stockings,
and a dangle of hair that should have been up, her large parent had
thrust into my hand a scrap-book.

"Here is what the Santa Fe Observer says;" and when I would have read,
she read aloud for me. "The next is the Los Angeles Christian Home. And
here's what they wrote about her in El Paso: 'Her histrionic genius for
one so young'--it commences below that picture. That's Leola." I now
recognized the black stockings and the hair. "Here's what a literary
lady in Lordsburg thinks," pursued Mrs. Mattern.

"Never mind that," murmured Leola.

"I shall." And the mother read the letter to me. "Leola has spoke in
five cultured cities," she went on. "Arvasita can depict how she was
encored at Albuquerque last Easter-Monday."

"Yes, sir, three recalls," said Arvasita, arriving at our group by the
fence. An elder sister, she was, evidently. "Are you acquainted with
'Camill'?" she asked me, with a trifle of sternness; and upon my
hesitating, "the celebrated French drayma o