"I told him 'yes,' and was just going on to explain to him how I had had it operated upon when he interrupted me. 'Then it was a good breed,' he said. 'That tail is the mark of a fine dog. Each curl in the tail adds fifteen dollars to the value of the animal.'" Miss Billy's eyes looked solemnly down into John Thomas's widely distended orbs: "Think of it!" she said: "Forty-five dollars cut off at one fell swoop! I can assure you my cousin has never heard the last of it." "Where's the dog now?" "Dead. Run over by a street car. I cried for months. I don't expect to ever own another like Serena." John Thomas drew a long breath, and turning to his box began a search for a leather hinge. Miss Billy felt herself distinctly dismissed, but she still held on to the fence. "I want to ask you,--" she began again,--"what I can do about a flower bed that's just all stones. I'm trying to dig it, you know." "Take the stones out," said John Thomas laconically. "But there wouldn't be anything left! It's _all_ stones!" "Maybe it's just a fillin', an' there's good dirt underneath," suggested the boy. "Won't you please step over and look at it?" entreated Miss Billy: so John Thomas, with open reluctance, laid down his hammer and nails, and climbed as awkwardly as possible over the fence. "If it's fillin' it goes awful deep," he decided, after a quarter of an hour of hard work. "Nothin' can't grow in here." "But I must have some flowers!" wailed Miss Billy, in despair. "Why, that was one reason that I wanted to come and live on Cherry Street,--because there was a big yard here, you know." John Thomas was regarding the rocky flower bed musingly. "I'll tell you what I can do," he said at last. "There's more than a foot of this out already,--an' I'll go down to where my father has got some teams hauling dirt from a cellar they're digging, an' I'll bring you a load, if you'd like it. It's good black dirt." "John Thomas Hennesy!" exclaimed Miss Billy, clasping her hands in ecstasy: "A load,--_a whole load_,--of black dirt?" "Why sure," said John Thomas, reddening with pleasure. "They're just dumping it into an old quarry." "A whole load of black dirt!" said Miss Billy, musingly. "I'll have pansies, and sweet-peas, and geraniums, and I'll sow grass seed on the bad places in the yard. John Thomas Hennesy, you're a prize!" * * * * * That evening, as the Lee family assembled around the tea-table, the minister said cheerily, "I had a peculiar thing to be thankful for to-day. It was the song and whistle of a light-hearted boy. It helped me with my sermon." "I have to be thankful for a daughter who took the cake baking off my hands and helped me with the mending," said Mrs. Lee, smiling over at Beatrice. "I am thankful for John Thomas Hennesy and black dirt!" declared Miss Billy fervently. "And I," wound up Theodore proudly, "for getting a steady Saturday job, taking care of Brown's soda fountain, at a dollar a day!"