nd having a holiday at all."

"Speak for yourself if you like," growled Miles, who was thirteen;
"but I want to get this schooling business over and done with, so
that I can start doing something useful."

"And speak grammatically, please, or else keep silent. You should
have said, 'Miles and I'," remarked Katherine with quite crushing
dignity, as she turned from the window to take her place at the
table once more. Phil thrust his tongue in his cheek, after the
manner beloved of small boys, and subsided into silence and an
abstracted study of his spelling book.

The schoolroom was a small chamber, partitioned off from the store
by a wall of boards so thin that all conversation about buying and
selling, with the gossip of the countryside thrown in, was plainly
audible to the pupils, whose studies suffered in consequence. The
stovepipe from the store went through this room, keeping it
comfortably warm, and in winter 'Duke Radford and the boys slept
there, because it was so terribly cold in the loft.

Katherine had come home from college in July, determined to teach
school all winter, and to make a success of it, too, in a most
unpromising part of the world. But even the most enthusiastic
teacher must fail to get on if there are no scholars to teach, and
at present she had only Miles and Phil, her two brothers, as
pupils. This was most trying to Katherine's patience, for, of
course, if there had only been pupils enough, she could have had a
properly constituted school, and a salary also. She might even
have had a regular schoolhouse to teach in, instead of being
compelled to use a makeshift such as this. But everything must
have a beginning, and so she had worked on bravely through the
autumn, hoping against hope for more pupils. In the intervals
between teaching the boys she kept the books for her father, and
even attended to the wants of an occasional customer when 'Duke
Radford was busy or absent.

The store at Roaring Water Portage was awkwardly placed for
business. It stood on a high bank overlooking the rapids, and when
it was built, five years before, had been the centre of a mining
village. But the mining village had been abandoned for three years
now, because the vein of copper had ended in a thick seam of coal,
which, under present circumstances, was not worth working. Now the
nearest approach to a village was at Seal Cove, at the mouth of the
river, nearly three miles away, where there were abo