The Browns have also two table-boarders from Boston,--Miss Paulina Hemmenshaw and her beautiful niece, Louise, a superbly healthy brunette. Their friend, Mr. Henry Hilton, during an absence abroad, has lent for the winter to these ladies his toy ranch, with its aesthetically fashioned dwelling-house. The Hemmenshaws dine and sup at Alamo Ranch, and the aunt, a cooking-school graduate, is known to make at Hilton Ranch for herself and niece wonderful blazer breakfasts, consisting mainly of dishes new-fangled of name, and eminently trying to mortal digestion. There are, besides, some half-dozen male lungers unaccompanied by friends; and two impecunious invalids to whom the kind-hearted landlord, George Brown, allows bed and board in return for light-choring about the ranch. These latter are democratically counted in with the dining-room boarders. Leon Starr, by common consent the "star boarder" of Alamo Ranch, has already been presented to the reader. He has taken the large two-windowed room on the ground-floor commanding a glorious view of the distant Organ Mountains. After getting his breath in this unaccustomed altitude, Leon's next care has been for the depressed lungers who daily gather on the boarding-house piazza and wonder if life is still worth living. To get them outside themselves by cheery good-fellowship, to perform for them little homely services, not much in the telling, but making their lives a world easier, has been a part of his method for uplifting their general tone. Of an inventive turn of mind, and an amateur mechanic, he has brought with him a tiny tool chest; and it soon becomes the family habit to look to Leon Starr for general miscellaneous tinkering, as the mending of door and trunk locks, the regulating watches and clocks, the adjustment of the bedevilled sewing-machine of their good landlady, and the restoration of harmonious working to all disgruntled mechanical gear, from garret to cellar. He it is who, on rainy days, manufactures denim clothes-bags for clumsy-fingered fellows; who fashions from common canes gathered on banks of irrigating ditches, photo-frames for everybody, and shows them how to arrange the long cane tassels with decorative effect above door and window, and how to soften the glare of kerosene lamps by making for them relieving shades of rose-colored paper. Pessimistic indeed is that lunger who, succumbing to the charm of this gracious nature, does not feel the cheery lift in his heavy atmosphere. From the landlord and his wife, both worn by the strain of doing their best for chronically discontented people, down to Fang Lee, the Chinese chef, Dennis Kearney, the table-waiter, the over-worked Mexican house-maids, and the two native chore-boys--one and all rise up to call the star boarder blessed. Out on the mesa the air is finer and brighter than on the lower plane of the ranch, and full of the life and stir of moving things,--quail, rabbits, and doves.