don't know much, 'way off here, about city
people."

"There hasn't been a daily paper for ten days that hasn't had his
name in it," the girl remarked dryly.

Mrs. Winterpine wiped her face, flanked the ham with the potatoes,
assembled an incredible array of sweets and relishes in odd, thick
little glass dishes, and with a wave of her hand indicated her
guests' places.

"We take the _Lockwood's Corners Clarion_," she explained
pacifically.

They addressed themselves to the meal, a strange trio. Caroline,
usually a hopeless chatterbox, fell somehow and inevitably into the
listener's seat. Their hostess could no longer be denied: her thirst
gleamed in her eyes, and flesh and blood could not have withstood
her plea for tidings of those distant, rosy lands whose laden
wharves she could never see, nor ever glimpse their tiled roofs
under foreign sunsets, their white spires beneath mysterious moons.
Their clothes: was it true that the French wore wooden shoes? She
had read that men in Italy walked in gay capes, colored like birds.
Was there water in the streets, and were boats really their
carriages? Did soldiers, red-coated, demand passports? Had her guest
seen the snow tops of green slopes? Did dogs drag milk carts for
white-capped women?

The girl, sulky at first, yielded finally, and in quick, nervous
phrases poured out of her full budget. Taken from her convent
school in California at fifteen, she had roamed the world with the
tireless "J. G." From Panama to Alaska, from Cairo to Christiania,
with her uncreased Paris frocks and the discontented line between
her dark eyes, she had steamed and sailed and ridden; she had
ridden a camel in Algeria, a gelding in Hyde Park, a broncho
on the Western plains.

"Why do you call your father 'J. G.'?" Caroline demanded suddenly.

"Do you like 'Klondike Jim' any better? That's his other name,"
Gold-bag shot at her defiantly.

Then came strange tales of a flaring, glaring mining camp: lights
and liquor and bared knives, rough men and rougher words, and in the
midst a thin, big-eyed little creature in the hand of a burly,
red-shirted miner, with the very gift of gold under his matted hair,
the scent for it in his blunt nostrils, the feel for it in his
callous finger tips. Klondike Jim! He had made for his Klondike as a
bloodhound makes for the quarry; he could not be mistaken. Night and
day she had been with him, his first claim named for her--the
Madeline--his first earnin