flying hair and wide, excited eyes, when she couldn't manage to escape out-doors, and feel the rapturous buffet of the winds and dash of the rain in her face. "She is like an electrical eel when there's a thunder-gust," she once overheard her grandmother say. "Some affinity between the child and the elements," her father had replied, half seriously. "She came into the world during the wildest and most destructive storm that ever swept over the State." After hearing that, Val felt no apology was needed for her desire to go out and romp with the winds. It was all very well for other people to shut doors and windows and sit in the middle of non-conducting feather-beds (as her mother had done), but how should Val be afraid of thunder and lightning? They had come forth in their splendor and their might to welcome her into the wonderful world. Dangerous to others? Oh, very likely. They were friends and allies of Val Gano. But not only through these more or less usual avenues did gladness reach her, but through some of the thorny by-ways before which men had set up the warning signal, "Pain!" There was that affair of the hornet's sting. How lustily she had howled when, stepping into the ash-gray nest down by the choke-pear-tree, she found herself surrounded by an army of angry enemies, darting little poisoned knives! How frantically she had run back to the house, rending the air with shrieks, and yet queerly conscious, after the first shock of surprise, that this was a curious experience and a great discovery, not alone of the power of hornets, but a discovery, too, of the power of pain in herself! Before she reached the house, and leaving a lusty yell only half finished in her throat, she had stopped to notice, with an excitement akin to pride, how the back of her hand and arm had puffed up to an enormous size, and was stinging still, as if a thousand knives were being turned about in the flesh. Here was something quite new. While it agonized her, it kept her sense of curiosity in a tumult of painful pleasure. She stood still, watching the hand swell, while the tears poured down her flushed cheeks, absorbed in noting the action of the poison, wondering how much more the uncanny power of the sting could swell her poor little distorted hand. Was there any pain more horrible than this? Was it possible human beings could endure anything worse? And if so, what? She shut her wet eyes, dizzy with suffering, and yet in the dim background of her mind almost avid of that intenser pang, if any such there were in the arsenal of Nature's weapons against man.