“Yes’m, in a way, though he’s never had much chance. He has beautiful hands, slim with long fingers, and his father gave him lessons up to the time Reuben was nine and his mother died. Since then Reuben has never had time for music. He has worked his own way, and besides--as pa says, ever since he rescued that tramp cat from the pine tree in the common at the Hollow, he’s been on the look out for that sort of extra jobs. It’s a sort of private joke between me and myself, the story of that rescue is, though I shouldn’t dare let Miss Penny know it, or pa or Rusty, my sister. I was away from home five years--ran away to seek my fortune and never caught up to it--and this happened in my absence. Pa told me the story the day after I got home and then Miss Penny. Ma told me, too, and no end of other people offered to. And to this day, pa or Miss Penny will ask me whether I happened to hear this or that particular and even if I say yes are likely to go on as if they suspected I didn’t get it straight or whole. But I will say it’s a good story and will bear repeating.” “O Anna, won’t you please tell it to us!” cried Alice, and her mother looked acquiescent and perhaps eager. Anna complied. The tale had, indeed, been told many a time before in Farleigh to the end of the Hollow; but though no narrator had ever before employed such a jargon of slang as the other Miller girl used, perhaps none had ever told it better nor more sympathetically. The telling of it amused and interested Alice Lorraine, who was already more drawn towards Anna Miller than she had been to any girl she had known before, but it affected her mother more powerfully. Henrietta Lorraine (‘Hetty’ was the little girl of the farm) had been for years a cold, proud woman, a slave, unconsciously, to her husband’s vast possessions. During the past six months, following the disgrace of her husband and his commitment to prison, her pride had become a sort of fierce arrogance, while her sense of injury, her bitterness towards all the world had shut her within bars hard as iron. But now as she sat quiet, the tension of months relaxed, with the kitten in her arms, and listened to the tale the odd, droll, charmingly pretty, appealing young girl rattled off so flippantly, something began to melt within her. Nor was it merely the icy crust that had protected her crushed feelings of late. As the kindly folk of the story rose compellingly before her, called forth by the wand of humourous sympathy of the yellow-haired fairy, and she saw not only Reuben Cartwright and the forlorn cat, but Miss Penny and Mr. Langley, the fat pony and the fat janitor who later was nearly to burn the grammar school building to the ground,--as she saw all this and more, the woman she had been for years was so moved that she felt almost like the woman she might and should have been. Alice got only the story Anna told. Her mother, who had been a country child herself and whose natural sympathy was with