"I'm glad you feel so. I was afraid I was prosy with my land-doctrine." "Oh no! Indeed no! You have given me a new hope; I am exalted with the thought; I shall try to think it all out and apply it." And so they parted, the children looking on and slyly whispering among themselves. Radbourn looked back after awhile but the bare little hive had absorbed its little group, and was standing bleak as a tombstone and hot as a furnace on the naked plain in the blazing sun. "America's pitiful boast!" said the young radical looking back at it. "Only a miserable hint of what it might be." All that forenoon as Lily faced her little group of barefoot children, she was thinking of Radbourn, of his almost fierce sympathy for these poor supine farmers, hopeless, and in some cases content in their narrow lives. The children almost worshipped the beautiful girl who came to them as a revelation of exquisite neatness and taste,--whose very voice and intonation awed them. They noted (unconsciously, of course,) every detail. Snowy linen, touches of soft color, graceful lines of bust and side--the slender fingers that could almost speak, so beautifully flexile were they. Lily herself sometimes, when she shook the calloused, knotted, stiffened hands of the women, shuddered with sympathetic pain, to think that the crowning wonder and beauty of God's world should be so maimed and distorted from its true purpose. Even in the children before her she could see the inherited results of fruitless labor--and more pitiful yet in the bent shoulders of the older ones she could see the beginnings of deformity that would soon be permanent. And as these things came to her, she clasped the poor wondering things to her side with a convulsive wish to make life a little brighter for them. "How is your mother, Sadie?" she asked of Sadie Burns, as she was eating her luncheon on the drab-colored table near the open window. "Purty well," said Sadie in a hesitating way. Lily was looking out, and listening to the gophers whistling as they raced to and fro. She could see Bob Burns lying at length on the grass in the pasture over the fence, his heels waving in the air, his hands holding a string which formed a snare. Bob was "death on gophers." It was like fishing to young Izaak Walton. It was very still and hot and the cheep and trill of the gophers, and the chatter of the kingbirds alone broke the silence. A cloud of butterflies were fluttering about a pool near, a couple of big flies buzzed and mumbled on the pane. "What ails your mother?" Lily asked, recovering herself and looking at Sadie who was distinctly ill at ease. "Oh, I dunno," Sadie replied, putting one bare foot across the other. Lily insisted. "She 'n' pa's had an awful row--" "Sadie!" said the teacher warningly, "what language!" "I mean they quarrelled, an' she don't speak to him any more." "Why, how dreadful!" "An' pa he's awful cross,--and she won't eat when he does, an' I haf to wait on table."