"Good!" said Anna's father when he saw it. "I didn't believe there was much in this new process of photography, but there is. Monsieur Daguerre and all those who have made improvements on his discovery certainly deserve great honor. This is really a picture of my little girl. If this is Aunt Anna's, then I must have another to keep myself." "It really is a good picture of Anna, isn't it?" said Mrs. Holman as her husband passed it back to her. Then, as she looked again at the picture, she laughed merrily. "It is a very good picture of the galoshes, too." "The galoshes!" exclaimed Anna. "The galoshes!" said her father. "Didn't I take them off?" asked Anna. "It must be that you didn't," replied her mother. "Never mind; it must be a very fine picture of you yourself or we should have seen the galoshes sooner." Anna wondered if her Aunt Anna would notice the overshoes. The present reached her aunt in her far-off western home on Christmas day. "I am delighted with the picture," she wrote. "It is like having a visit from my dear little niece. It seems as if she could speak to me if she wished. What a lovely dress, and what a lovely guimpe! Really, I am so pleased with the picture that I even admire the _galoshes_." Anna had many other pictures taken before she was grown up, but she said she always felt the marvel of sitting before a camera for the sun to reflect and imprint her features on a plate which she could not see. Indeed, the faithfulness and the certainty of the result always made her declare that she could never have her picture taken without recalling the lines which Lucy Larcom wrote after her first daguerreotype was made: "Oh, what if thus our evil deeds Are mirrored on the sky, And every line of our wild lives Daguerreotyped on high." THE STORY OF THE REAPER "What if Cyrus McCormick should be able to make his reaper really work and we could cut all that wheat by machinery! No more dreadful backaches then in harvest time!" said Ezra Harding, as he stood looking out of the back door of a Virginia farmhouse one bright morning in June in the year 1832. He saw nothing of the beauty all around him; all he saw was acre upon acre of yellow wheat ready to be harvested. How he dreaded the harvesting! It meant the hardest work his father ever asked him to do. Help was so scarce that even Ezra, the youngest of the five Harding boys, though he was only fifteen, had to do a man's work. It made Ezra feel almost eighty to think about the back-breaking work that was to begin the next morning.