The object of their sudden interest was a rockery in the front yard. This work, a pile of smooth boulders about three feet in height, and as yet only partially covered with young vines, was the only scenic rival to the artificial pond in the Harmons' front yard. Steve Brown built it to please his mother, picking up a boulder here and there in the course of his travels and getting it home by balancing it on the horn of his saddle. During the last weeks of her illness, when her wandering mind went back to the hills of her girlhood, her imagination played continually around this mimic mountain of Steve's, and as it seemed to be the one joy of her prairie-spent life, he would carry her out on the porch in good weather and prop her up so that she could sit and look at it. Jonas Hicks, becoming interested, took a hand in the work; he kept on making contributions as long as the resources of the country held out. Here was one reason that there was not a sole stone remaining to be discovered. "If we only had a few of them!" suggested Mrs. Norton. "Yes--but he might not like it," said the younger Mrs. Plympton. "But we would just borrow them, you know," explained Mrs. Norton. "And anyway, how are we going to get along without them? Here we have arranged for the Professor to come and tell us about them; and we all promised to bring a specimen. It will seem strange for not one of us to have a rock." "Oh, I don't think it would do any harm for us to borrow a few stones," said Kitty Wright. "I don't see anything so awful about it." There came a pause of indecision. Mrs. Harmon--she was the dignified Daniel Webster of the circle, and just the opposite of the small and sprightly Mrs. Wright--was yet to be heard from. "Really," she said, "we ought not to agree to do things and then not do them. We should have done it or else found somebody like Jonas Hicks to do it for us. What's everybody's business is nobody's business." "And what's nobody's business is everybody's business," added Mrs. Wright. "Good!" exclaimed Mrs. Norton. "Where did you hear that, Kitty?" "I just heard myself say it. I did it with my little hatchet." "Sort of a double-edged axiom," observed Mrs. Harmon. "I am su-u-u-ure," chimed Grandma Plympton, "that if Mr. Brown were here, and knew the circumstances, he would most wi-i-i-llingly offer to assist us. Of course, we should never take--what does not belong to us, without the owner's permission, but I am qui-i-i-i-ite sure that if we were to take them and put them back just where we got them, Mr. Brown would quite approve of it." "Mother has a very high opinion of Stephen Brown," said Mrs. Plympton. "Mr. Brown is quite a gentleman, indeed," said Grandma.