?"

"My goody, Polly! But it must be a corker!"--and Dan was all
attention.

Now Polly, it is needless to repeat, was a young person of ideas; that
was her strong point, and Dan at least considered her a marvel of
ingenuity and invention. Their tiny sitting-room, where Dan slept, was
a witness to her taste and originality. There were picturesque shelves
which Dan had made in accordance with her directions; there were
cheesecloth window-curtains, with rustic boughs in place of poles;
there were barrels standing bottom upward for tables, draped with
ancient "duds"--a changeable-silk skirt of her mother's over one, a
moth-eaten camel's-hair shawl over another. The crack in the only
mirror which a munificent landlord had provided was concealed by a
kinikinick vine; a piece of Turkey-red at five cents a yard, their one
bit of extravagance, converted Dan's cot-bed into a canopy of state.
And having heard Dan chant the praises of her "ideas" with gratifying
persistence for a month past, Polly had begun to wonder whether they
might not be turned to account.

"What's the latest idea, Polly?" Dan asked, seizing a dripping handful
of what they were pleased to call their "family plate."

"Well, Dan, I want you to paint something more on my sign. Only two
words; it won't take you long."

"What two words?"

"_Also Ideas!_"

Dan reflected a moment, and then he proceeded to dance a jig of
delight, wildly waving his dish-cloth about Polly's head.

"Polly, you beat the world!" he cried.

A house-painter lived next door, from whom Dan borrowed paint and
brushes, and before they slept the old sign was further decorated with
two magic words done in brilliant scarlet. The inscription now read:

FINE NEEDLEWORK AND EMBROIDERY TO ORDER.
ALSO IDEAS

There was something positively dazzling about those two words in
flaming scarlet, and Polly and Dan stepped out twice in the course of
their early breakfast to have a look at them.

"Don't you feel scared, Polly?" asked Dan, as he left her at her
dish-washing.

"Scared? Not I!" and she walked down the path with him, drying her
hands on a dish-towel.

It was a delicious morning in late September; the air dry and
sparkling as a jewel, the mountains baring their shoulders to the
morning sun. The Peak had already a dash of winter on his crown, but
the barren slope of rock below looked like an impregnable fortress.
Polly and Dan were never