s first lighted on them.

The evening before her sixth birthday, as we stood together watching
the sun go down, a thought for the following day came to me.

"And what do you want for your birthday, Little Flower!" I asked.

"The little houses," she said, leaning her head against me.

"What for?" I inquired, thinking perhaps that she believed them play
houses.

"Dame Dickenson, Father Michel, Uncle Ben----" she stopped.

"To live in?" I inquired.

"To keep," she answered quietly.

The more I thought it over the more pleased I became with the idea that
these devoted people, who gave their lives to Nancy, should be
rewarded. I was perhaps especially pleased at the thought of doing
something for Father Michel, of whom I would now be speaking.

He was at this time a young man, still under twenty-five, who had come,
none knew from what place, to live at the Cairn Mills with the dear old
priest who married Marian and me. What tragedy had been behind him none
knew, but Dickenson told me that from the time he first saw the child
his heart went out to her, and that after the meeting there was no
keeping him from the old inn, where he finally took up his residence as
one of the family.

Old Uncle Ben, whose sea tales were one of Nancy's chiefest joys, and
whose wooden leg was her greatest perplexity, I felt deserved some
recognition of his service, and, to shorten the telling, in less than a
month these houses were occupied as Nancy had desired they should
be--Father Michel being given the large one, with Nancy's dwarfed boy,
Dame Dickenson the next, and Uncle Ben becoming the proud occupant of a
third. It seemed a sort of child's play to me at first, and Mrs. Opie's
statement that I built these houses at this period for the work on the
Burnside, is entirely without foundation.

Some credit has been bestowed upon me as well for the working out of a
labor problem here, but it is honor undeserved, for the thing began in
the entirely unintentional manner which I have set down, and the
working out of it came at a later date through Nancy's thinking and the
zeal and goodness of Father Michel.[2]

[2] It was about this period that the "Lace School" was regularly
begun, which occurred by no plan of mine, but in the following
way: Sandy had had two young women from the north for house
service at Arran, and finding them unused to labor, proposed that
Dame Dickenson should teach them the Irish lac