was looking first down into her face, and then at the industrious kiddie getting his supper from the maternal fount, and then at the handsome bunch on the steps, as he alternately munched a bite of his cookie and fed Mamie one, to the delight of the children.  The expression on his face as he looked at them, and her, and ate and laughed, is what is back of all that goes to make the American nation the greatest on earth.  Amen!

“Sallie,” I said, as I reached out and took her plump white hand in mine, “our men are the most wonderful in the world and they are ours any way we get them.  They don’t care how it is done, and neither do we, just so we belong in the right way.”

“Then you don’t think it would be any harm for me to tell Mr. Haley I think I could live on eighteen hundred dollars a year, until he gets sent to a larger church?” was the bomb that, thus encouraged, Sallie exploded in my face.

I’m awfully glad that I didn’t get a chance to answer, for I don’t want to be responsible for the future failure or success of Mr. Haley’s ministry.  Just then Henrietta burst into the room with the Kitten in her arms.

“Keep her for me, Evelina, please, ma’am,” she said, with the dearest little chuckle, but not forgetting the polite “please,” which Jane had had to suggest to her just once.  What you’ve done for that wayward unmanageable genius of a child, Jane dear, makes you deserve ten of your own.  That is—­help!

“Cousin Augusta and Nell and Dickie and me is a going out to watch the man put the dyn’mite in the hole to blow the creek right up and Glendale, too, so they can see if they is enough clean water to put in the waterworks,” she continued to explain.  “Nell is a-going to take Dickie in her car, and Cousin Augusta is a-going to take me and Uncle Peter in her buggy.  Dilsie have got the Kit and Cousin Marfy is a-watching to see she don’t do nothing wrong with her.  Oh, may I go, Sallie?  Jane said I must always ask you.”

“Yes, dearest,” answered Sallie, immensely flattered by the deference thus paid her.

“How wonderful an influence the little talks Mr. Haley has had with Henrietta have had on her,” she said, with such a happy glow on her face as the reformed one departed that I succeeded in suppressing the laugh that rose in me at the memory of Henrietta’s account of the first one of the series.

Men need not fear that the time will ever come when they will cease to get the credit for making Earth’s wheels go around, from the female inhabitants thereof.  So I smiled to myself and buried my face in the fragrance under the bubbly Puppy girl’s chin and coaxed her arms to clasp around my neck.

They are the holy throb of a woman’s life—­babies.  Less than ten wouldn’t satisfy me unless well scattered in ages, Jane.  On some questions I am not modern.

“Still I do feel so miserable leaving Cousin James so alone all winter,” Sallie continued with the most beautiful sympathy in her voice, as she looked out of the window towards Widegables.  “I wonder if I ought to make up my mind to stay with him?  He loves the children so, and you know the plans of Cousin Jasmine and the others to go back to their farm.”