“Oh, yes, of course, that was twenty-five years ago. The rat money went into well-advised real estate; we are settled here, and the missus and the girls have gone to bring my mother, past seventy, to live with us. No, I didn’t go; I couldn’t. My brother is back on the place, and married to a girl with some property. Made money himself in Australia, they say,—God knows how. “When you know that the things you remember aren’t there, and other things _are_, it’s best not to go back. Now, Dr. Russell, tell me, should I tell my girls, and the men that will want to marry them some day, the story that I’ve told you? What do you think?” “I think,” said father, standing up so that they stood face to face, “that you are a gentleman; that being said is all, and there is my hand upon it. Nine o’clock already; we must be going.” Tom Scott picked up his ratting bag that held some of his famous traps, and, taking the old card from the shelf, was about to throw it into the fire, then hesitated, and put it back in the case facing his mother’s picture, saying with a smile, half sad, half humorous, “I’m afraid, sir, there’s that about the old business that would make me lonely if I forgot.” * * * * * A month later a paragraph appeared in the local papers that read as follows: “Mr. Thomas Scott of our town has made good his promise of ending the scourge of rats, and has turned over the sum of two hundred dollars, he having doubled the amount of the reward offered, to the Bridgeton Hospital. “There is a pretty little incident connected with this work. Mr. Scott, who has made a fortune in real estate, got his first start by inventing and patenting a particularly clever rat-trap, and it was with some of these traps, put by and almost forgotten, that he has been of so much use to his fellow-townsmen, for which they now take this way of expressing their thanks.” XII TRANSITION =DECEMBER=—THE MOON OF SNOWSHOES I “Good King Wenceslas looked out, On the feast of Stephen, When the snow lay round about, Deep and crisp and even!” sang the violin with pathetic accent, and then stopped abruptly, as the player dropped the bow and pressed his face against the window. The stars shone from the cold blue of a cloudless sky; below lay the city ablaze with light. It was a Danish city, and the player was a Dane, but when a violin sings, it speaks to each one in his own language. Bells pealing from a neighbouring church took up the same carol of Christmastide, and young voices echoed it faintly from within the doors of many homes.