There was once a muffin-man who carried muffins about the streets of a large city to sell. He carried them in two square baskets, on his shoulders. In the street where he served the people with muffins, a poor sailor’s wife lived. She was sick, and she could not work, and she had not any body to give her money, for her husband was a sailor, and he was out at sea in a great ship. She had a young child, and she was so poor that she had not even enough money to buy bread. The good muffin-man stopped every day and gave her some muffins out of one of his baskets to eat. Whenever the muffin-man stopped, the little child would run away from her mother to come to him, because she was so glad to see him. Mary’s scholars thought the muffin-man was very good and kind. There was a picture over the story, and Mary showed them the picture. After they had talked about the poor sailor’s wife, and the little child, and the muffin-man, Carry Deacon asked, “Why the people did not make muffins at home?” Mary told her, “That in large cities, such as Boston, New York and Philadelphia, the people who lived there bought many things, which the country people made at home. They bought their milk and their butter and their meat and their eggs, because the houses were built up closely together, and there was not room enough, in towns, to keep cows and pigs and chickens. Mary asked Carry if she had never seen people carrying milk and bread and fruit about, when she was in Philadelphia.” Carry said, “Yes, she had seen a man carrying a bucket with bright hoops around it; and her aunt, at whose house she stayed, told her the bucket had milk in it.” And Carry said, “She saw a woman carrying oranges in a basket, and the woman knocked at people’s doors, and asked them to buy her oranges.” [Illustration: ~Second Day.~ The fruit woman on her way to town p. 51. ] Mary went around among her scholars, while they were writing, to see that they held their pens and pencils properly. She rubbed out some of Lily Forester’s straight marks and round o’s, because her strokes were crooked and her o’s were not well formed, and Lily said she would try again. While the scholars were writing, Mary looked over the Bible to select a chapter to read at the close of the school. Carry Deacon came up to Mary and whispered to her, to please to read about the beautiful garden where Adam and Eve lived a great while ago and talked with our Heavenly Father.