“I’ll tell you, Sammy,” he said. “You come over to-night, and we’ll each read one--oh Jehoshaphat!” He had suddenly remembered his home work,--a double allowance of fractions because he had failed to-day. “Make it to-morrow night, Sammy,” he said. “I’ve got home work to-night.” A window on the fourth floor above was raised, a frowsy head stuck out. “Sammee!” called a strident voice. “Come in and eat.” “So long. Sorry to leave you,” said Sammy, and departed upward, while Wendell sat and mused on the post. Once more he drifted away into memories of fairy tales. At length he shook himself with a heartfelt though silent, “Gee whiz! I wish I were living in a fairy story right now, here in Boston,” and slid down and went in to dinner. Wendell’s family consisted of his father and mother and two older brothers, Alden and Otis. Just now there was also a visiting relative, Cousin Virginia, a sprightly young lady from New York, who tolerated Boston because it was only five hours from her delightful home town. She seemed to live in a constant state of amusement at things that Wendell’s people didn’t consider funny at all. Her greeting this time to Wendell was, “Well, Ralph Waldo Theocritus Shakespeare, how’s the Public Library to-day?” Wendell didn’t see anything funny in that. He grunted. “Did you happen to see that interesting new volume of correspondence between Socrates and Lady Jane Grey?” Wendell didn’t even know that this was intended to be funny. “I was reading fairy stories,” he said. “Shocking!” said Cousin Virginia. “A descendant of the Puritans!” “As to that,” broke in Wendell’s brother Alden, who was a Junior at Harvard, specializing in Original Sources, “the Puritans had some imagination. Look at witchcraft. Look at the Wishing Stone.” “What wishing stone?” asked Cousin Virginia. “I’ve seen the kind they set in a ring on a girl’s third finger. Do you mean that kind?” This bit of levity fell flat. “The Wishing Stone,[A]” said Alden, “was a projecting boulder in the Common, somewhere near the present junction of the Beacon Street mall and the Oliver Wendell Holmes walk. There was a tradition that if one walked or ran nine times around the stone and then stood or sat on it and silently made a wish, the wish would come true.” [A] Winsor’s _Memorial History of Boston_, vol. I., p. 554. “And here you’ve shown me all the sights of Boston and left that out!” cried Cousin Virginia. “Why, it’s much more interesting than Bunker Hill Monument. Let us hie us thither by moonlight as soon as we finish dinner. Careful, Wendell; if your eyes _should_ pop right out, you couldn’t put them back.” “The stone,” said Alden, “is no longer there.” “Oh, where is it, Alden?” cried Wendell. “According to the early diarists,” returned Alden, “most of those boulders on the Common were used for building stone from time to time. I doubt whether its history could possibly be traced.”