Halstead's eye was so much inflamed that we had no little trouble in getting the eyestone under the lid. Finally, however, the old Squire, with Addison's help, slipped it in. Halstead cried out, but the old Squire made him keep his eye closed; then the old gentleman bandaged it, and made him lie down. But after all, I am unable to report definitely as to the efficacy of the eyestone, for shortly after five o'clock, when the stone had been in Halstead's eye a little more than an hour, Doctor Green came. He had returned on the afternoon train from Portland, and learning that we had sent for him earlier in the day, hurried out to the farm. When he examined Halstead's eye, he found the eyestone near the outer canthus, and near it the irritating bit of wheat beard. He removed both together. Whether or not the eyestone had started the piece of wheat beard moving toward the outer corner of the eye was doubtful; but Doctor Green said, laughingly, that we could give the good old panacea the benefit of the doubt. It was not until we were at the supper table that evening--with Halstead sitting at his place, his eye still bandaged--that I found a chance to explain fully why I had been gone so long on my errand. Theodora and grandmother actually shed tears over my account of poor little Ike. The old Squire was so indignant at the treatment the boy had received that he set off early the next morning to interview the selectmen. As a result, they took little Ike from the Doles and put him into another family, the Winslows, who were very kind to him. Mrs. Winslow, indeed, gave him a mother's care and affection. The boy soon began to grow properly. Within a year you would hardly have recognized him as the pinched and skinny little fellow that once had lived at the Dole farm. He grew in mind as well as body, and before long showed so much promise that the Winslows sent him first to the village academy, and afterward to Westbrook Seminary, near Portland. When he was about twenty-one he went West as a teacher; and from that day on his career has been upward. CHAPTER XXIV BORROWED FOR A BEE HUNT We were eating breakfast one morning late in August that summer when through an open window a queer, cracked voice addressed the old Squire: "Don't want to disturb ye at your meals, Squire, but I've come over to see if I can't borry a boy to hark fer me." It was old Hughy Glinds, who lived alone in a little cabin at the edge of the great woods, and who gained a livelihood by making baskets and snowshoes, lining bees and turning oxbows. In his younger days he had been a noted trapper, bear hunter and moose hunter, but now he was too infirm and rheumatic to take long tramps in the woods. The old Squire went to the door. "Come in, Glinds," he said.