“Oh, yes, Uncle Joe,” Carolyn May hastened to assure him. “There’s a strap in my bag—right on top of the other things. _Do_ let me get it. You see, Prince has had trouble with cats; they worry him.” “Looks to me,” grunted Mr. Stagg, “as though he’d like to worry them. What Aunty Rose will say to that mongrel——” “Oh, dear me!” sighed the little girl. This “Aunty Rose” he spoke of must be a regular ogress! Carolyn May had opened the bag and found the strong strap, and now she snapped it into the ring of Prince’s collar. “You’ll just _have_ to be good, now, you darling old dear!” she whispered to him. It was half a mile from Main Street to The Corners. There was tall timber all about Sunrise Cove, which was built along the shore of a deep inlet cutting in from the great lake, whose blue waters sparkled as far as one might see towards the south and west. Uncle Joe assured Carolyn May, when she asked him, that from the highest hill in sight one could see only the lake and the forest-clothed hills and valleys. Why, there was not a brick house anywhere! “We don’t have any apartment houses, or janitors, or gas and electricity up here,” said Mr. Stagg grimly. “But there’s lumber camps all about. Mebbe they’ll interest you. Lots of building going on all the time, too. Sunrise Cove is growing, but it isn’t very citified yet.” He told her, as they went along, of the long trains of cars and of the strings of barges going out of the Cove, all laden with timber and sawed boards, millstuff, ties, and telegraph poles. They came to the last house in the row of dwellings on this street, on the very edge of the town. Carolyn May saw that attached to the house was a smaller building, facing the roadway, with a wide-open door, through which she glimpsed benches and sawed lumber, while to her nostrils was wafted a most delicious smell of shavings. “Oh, there’s a carpenter shop!” exclaimed Carolyn May. “And is that the carpenter, Uncle Joe?” A tall old man, lean-faced and closely shaven, with a hawk’s-beak nose straddled by a huge pair of silver-bowed spectacles, came out of the shop at that moment, a jack-plane in his hand. He saw Mr. Stagg and, turning sharply on his heel, went indoors again. “Who is he, Uncle Joe?” repeated the little girl. “And, if I asked him, do you s’pose he’d give me some of those nice, long, curly shavings?” “That’s Jed Parlow—and he _wouldn’t_ give you any shavings; especially after having seen you with me,” said the hardware merchant brusquely. The pretty lady whose name was Parlow and the queer-looking old carpenter, whose name was likewise Parlow, would neither look at Uncle Joe! Even such a little girl as Carolyn May could see that her uncle and the Parlows were not friendly. It puzzled her, but she did not feel that she could ask Uncle Joe about it. So she trudged by his side, holding to his hand and to the dog’s leash.