company that she could pay no attention to him.
She stood in the door with them so long that John Jay was in bed by the
time she came in. Although he pretended to be asleep, inwardly he was in
a quiver of excitement.

"I'll count 'em every night," he thought. The wish that burned in his
little heart was a very earnest one, fraught with hopes for his coming
birthday.

CHAPTER V.

Late hours did not agree with John Jay. Next morning he felt too tired
to stir. He groaned when he remembered that it was Sunday, for he
thought of the long, hot walk down to Brier Crook church. To his great
surprise, Mammy did not insist on his going with her: she had been
offered a seat in a neighbor's spring-wagon, and there was no room for
him.

So he spent a long, lazy morning, stretched out in the shade of the
apple-tree. A smell of clover and ripening orchards filled the heated
air. The hens clucked around drowsily with drooping wings. A warm breeze
stirred the grasses where he lay.

Ivy dug in the dirt with a broken spoon, while Bud kicked up his heels
beside John Jay, listening to a marvellous account of Miss Hallie's
party. It lost nothing in the telling. For years after, John Jay looked
back upon that night as a John of Patmos might have looked, remembering
some vision of the opened heavens. The lights, the music, the
white-robed figures, and above all, that wonderful fountain looking as
if it must have sprung from some "sea of glass mingled with fire," did
not belong to the earth with which he was acquainted. He repeated some
part of that recollection to Bud every day for a week, always ending
with the sentence uppermost in his thought: "And next Satiddy _I_ has a
buthday."

[Illustration: Under the apple-tree]

Of course he knew that his celebration could be nothing like Miss
Hallie's; but he had a vague idea that something would happen to make
the day unusual and delightful. Every night after he had gone to bed,
and when Mammy was drowsing on the doorstep, he raised himself to his
knees, and looked through a wide hole in the wall where the chinking had
dropped out from between the logs. Through this he could see a strip of
sky studded with twinkling stars. One by one he pointed out the magic
seven, repeating the charm and whispering the wish.

It was a long week, because he was in such a hurry for it to go by. But
Friday night came at last; and, as he counted the stars for the seventh
time, the little flutter of