ONE'S mother never has the appearance of any particular age. She does not look precisely young, because hers is the face to which our baby eyes are raised for comfort and guidance, it is from her that we receive and hope for all things. So it is impossible to realize that she is quite young. On the other hand the familiar, beloved face never wears the look of age, no matter how wrinkled it be, nor how far we have traveled from childhood. It is too dear, too perfectly the spring that quenches our thirst for unfailing love ever to look to us withered and age-stricken as it must to strangers. The young Scollards had never stopped to consider whether their mother was quite elderly, or very youthful--her age was swallowed up in the fact of her motherhood. In reality Charlotte Scollard was but just approaching the milestone of the fourth decade. She was a pale, slenderly built woman, with a worn, sweet face, like Margery's, but older and saddened. It wore a look of ill-health which her children saw too frequently to recognize fully, though the three eldest half perceived it at times, with a tightening of fear around their hearts. Polly and Penny clung around their mother's waist as she entered, Bob and Margery encircled her from each side with their loving arms, while Happie hugged her breathless, and Laura vainly strove for an opening for her own welcome. "Such a dear little home! Such joy to get home to you, my blessings!" said the mother, as she said each night. "Have you been good and happy all this day?" She went into the front room which was that nondescript allowed by flat life, neither drawing-room, library nor living-room, but a little of each. It was a pretty room, made so by its furnishing of books and pictures, and the mother looked about her, feeling anew that it was well worth the effort that taxed her slender strength to the utmost to maintain this nest and her nestlings within it. "We've found a name for the flat at last, motherkins!" cried Happie, as she removed her mother's hat pins, while Laura and Margery unbuttoned her coat, and the two least girls pulled off a glove from each hand. "Happie has," corrected Margery. "It's a nice, cozy, funny little name, just like this family." "Tell me," smiled Mrs. Scollard. "Patty-Pans!" announced Happie triumphantly. "I thought of it when I was pouring my cake into the cup pans. Don't you know that these flats are precisely like a patty-pan, every room following after and joining on to the next one the way the cups do in those sheets?" "I see the resemblance." Mrs. Scollard laughed, and the weariness went out of her face for the moment as her eyes danced. "Shall we have a die cut for our letter paper: 'Patty-Pans,' and printed in bright silver like new tins? Only I'm afraid our correspondents might think that all our letters should be dated April first!"