Oh, the joy of it--flying through the air! If she could only fly up instead of down! Every time she climbed back into the loft she would stop and cuddle the little brother and toss hay over him and tell him he was a baby bird, and she was the mother bird, and must fly away and bring him nice worms. She bade him look up to the rafters above and see the mother birds flying out and in, while the little birds just sat still in their nests and opened their mouths. So Bobby sat still, and when she returned, obediently opened his mouth; but alas! he wearied of his rôle in the play, and at last crept to the very edge of the loft at a place where there was no hay spread beneath to break his fall; and when Betty looked up and saw his sweet baby face peering down at her over the edge, her heart stopped beating. How wildly she called for him to wait for her to come to him! She promised him all the dearest of her treasures if he would wait until "sister" got there. Now, as she sat clasping her knees, her little body grew all trembling and weak again as she lived over the terrible moment when she had reached him just in time to drag him back from the edge, and to cuddle and caress him, until he lifted up his voice and wept, not because he was in the least troubled or hurt, but because it seemed to be the right thing to do. Then she gave him the pretty round comb that held back her hair, and he promptly straightened it and broke it; and when she reluctantly brought him back to dinner--how she had succeeded in getting him down from the loft would make a chapter of diplomacy--her mother reproved her for allowing him to take it, and lapped the two pieces and wound them about with thread, and told her she must wear the broken comb after this. She was glad--glad it was broken--and she had treasured it so--and glad that her mother had scolded her; she wished she had scolded harder instead of speaking words of praise that cut her to the heart. Oh, oh, oh! If he had fallen over, he would be dead now, and she would have killed him! Thus she tortured herself, and repented very hard. The other sin she had that day committed she felt to be a double sin, because she knew all the time it was wrong and did it deliberately. When she went out with the corn meal to feed the little chicks and fetch in the new-laid eggs, she carried, concealed under her skirt, a small, squat book of Robert Burns' poems. These poems she loved; not that she understood them, but that the rhythm pleased her, and the odd words and half-comprehended phrases stirred her imagination.